International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 84 (2015) 198–202

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International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijhmt

Experimental study on directional motion of a single droplet on cactus

spines
L. Guo, G.H. Tang ⇑
MOE Key Laboratory of Thermo-Fluid Science and Engineering, School of Energy and Power Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710049, PR China

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Cactus spines are found to have high efficiency of fog collection. The ability in rapidly driving droplets
Received 3 November 2014 could be applied in the condensation process to refresh the heat transfer area and improve the heat trans-
Received in revised form 26 December 2014 fer coefficients. The self-driven process of a single droplet on cactus spines is experimentally and theo-
Accepted 27 December 2014
retically studied. Both Newtonian droplet and shear-thinning non-Newtonian droplet move
Available online 19 January 2015
directionally from the tip to the base owing to the decreased Gibbs free energy along the spine. The
shear-thinning non-Newtonian droplet moves slower because of the increased viscosity loss. The maxi-
Keywords:
mum velocity observed in the experiment for water droplet is 1.17 m/s, exhibiting the high efficiency of
Cactus
Directional motion
conical spines on driving drops.
Condensate droplet Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Non-Newtonian fluid

1. Introduction were applied to generate droplets. It is difficult to analyze the

Condensation is one of the important processes in the power
generation industry, air-conditioning systems, cooling of electronic
devices, distillation industry, etc. Enhancement of condensation
heat transfer coefficients will benefit a wide range of applications.
Superhydrophobic surfaces with large contact angle and small slid-
ing contact angle are applied to condensing interfaces aiming to
form dropwise condensation to enhance the heat transfer [1–5].
However, heat transfer coefficients could be deteriorated by the
condensate droplets which lead to the decreased heat transfer area
and the increased thermal resistance. Therefore, finding how to
remove condensate droplets and refresh the surface rapidly has
been a significant issue. There are numerous techniques to make
droplets move spontaneously which solely depend on geometrical
structures without additional energy, such as the gradient of
Laplace pressure caused by conical shape [6–13], the gradient of
wettability arising from the roughness gradient or the surface ten-
sion gradient [14–24], the thermal gradient [25,26], and the stiff-
ness gradient [27]. However, how to drive droplets with high
efficiency is still a big challenge. Specifically, the spines of the Cact-
aceae family have been reported to drive droplets to move with
high efficiency. Ju et al. [10] reported that the integration of the
gradient of Laplace pressure, the gradient of surface free energy
and the multi-function integration enabled the high efficient drop
movements along the cactus spine. However, continuing fog flows
⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +86 29 82665319; fax: +86 29 82665445.
E-mail address: ghtang@mail.xjtu.edu.cn (G.H. Tang).
continuing droplets formed on spines and driven to the base one
after another. Therefore, the self-driven motion of a single droplet
on cactus spines is experimentally studied in this paper. The bal-
ance of various energy terms during the directional motion is also
discussed. Note that only the Laplace pressure gradient was con-
sidered in studies of directional motions of droplets on tapered
surfaces [6,7,10,13]. However, the gradient of wettability arising
from the roughness gradient of cactus surfaces also affects the
droplet motion apart from the Laplace pressure gradient in this
case. Therefore, the quantitative energy analysis of the directional
motion is performed from the aspect of the Gibbs free energy
including the gradient of the Laplace pressure and the wettability
simultaneously. In addition, existing studies were limited to New-
tonian droplet, but many industrial liquids exhibit non-Newtonian
behaviors. Non-Newtonian fluids are usually referred to as visco-
elastic fluid and fluids whose viscosity depends on the shear rate
such as shear-thinning, shear-thickening and yield-stress fluids.
Therefore, the present study focuses on droplet motions of both
shear-thinning fluid of xanthan solution and Newtonian fluid of
deionized water.
2. Theory
Michielsen et al. [9] proposed theoretical expressions of droplet
Gibbs free energy on a smooth conical fiber. Considering that the
present cactus spine is conical as well, the equations in [9] are
modified to calculate the droplet Gibbs free energy on a cactus

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijheatmasstransfer.2014.12.072
0017-9310/Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
 L. Guo, G.H. Tang / International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 84 (2015) 198–202
spine with the consideration of both the gradient of Laplace pres-
sure and surface roughness. First, the geometrical parameters are
defined as schematic in Fig. 1. The z axis is the symmetry axis of
the spine while the x axis is perpendicular to the z axis. a is the half
angle of a spine in the z direction. For calculation conveniences,
three points, A (x1, z1), B (x2, @z=@x ¼ 0) and C (x3, z3) are introduced
as shown in Fig. 1. The Gibbs free energy G for a drop on a tapered
surface can be expressed as [9]
G ¼ cSV At þ ðALV  ASL cos hÞcLV
where c is the surface energy, A is the interfacial surface area, the
subscript t indicates the total surface area of the cone, and the sub-
scripts SL, and LV refer to the solid–liquid, and liquid–vapor inter-
faces, respectively. Considering that the droplets cannot keep
stand on the spine, the dynamic contact angle h is employed to
character the surface wettability. The solid–liquid interfacial area
is calculated by ASL ¼ pðx23  x21 Þ= sin a. The liquid–vapor interfacial
area is
ALV ¼ 2px2 fða1 x1 þ x2 ÞEðu1 ; m1 Þ þ ða2 x3 þ x2 ÞEðu2 ; m2 Þg
where Eðu1 ; m1 Þ and Eðu2 ; m2 Þ are the elliptical integrals of the
second kind. u is the angle between the z axis and the normal direc-
tion to the liquid–vapor interface, calculated by u1 ¼ p=2 þ aþ
ðhR þ hA Þ=2 and u2 ¼ p=2 þ a  ðhR þ hA Þ=2, where hA and hR refer
to the advancing angle and the receding angle, respectively. a and
m are introduced substitute variables, defined as a1 ¼ fx2 cosðaþ
hR Þ  x1 g=fx2  x1 cosða þ hR gÞ, a2 ¼ fx2 cosða  hA Þ  x3 g=fx2  x3
cosða  hA Þg, m21 ¼ ðx22  a21 x21 Þ=x22 and m22 ¼ ðx22  a22 x23 Þ=x22 . The varia-
tion of the Gibbs free energy, DG, is defined as
DG ¼ G f  G s ;
where the superscript f and s indicate the final state and the starting
state of the studied process, respectively. The kinetic energy and
viscous loss are introduced for quantitative energy analysis. The
kinetic energy, E, is given as
E ¼ qV v 2 =2;
where q is the density of the liquid, V is the droplet volume, and v is
the average velocity of the droplet on the spine. Assuming that the
drop profile is circular, the viscous loss, Wv, is calculated by [16]
W v ffi 3plRv l lnðxmax =xmin Þ;
where R is the droplet base radius, l is the moving distance along the
spine of droplet, and xmin and xmax are two cutoff lengths, represent-
ing the order of molecular diameter and the drop radius. l is the
shear viscosity, which is constant for water. As for the shear-thin-
ning xanthan solutions, the viscosity is calculated by the Ost-
wald–De Waele equation l ¼ kc_ n1 , where c_ is the shear rate, n is
the power law index, and k is the consistency index. In the present
paper, the shear rate is calculated by c_ ¼ v =2R. To get rid of the
effect of volume, energy terms G, Wv, E and DG as well as the coor-
2 2
dinate x1 are normalized as Gn ¼ G=ðpd cLV Þ, W vn ¼ W v =ðpd cLV Þ,
2 2
En ¼ E=ðpd cLV Þ, DGn ¼ DG=ðpd cLV Þ and xn ¼ 2x1 =d, respectively.
Here d is the equivalent droplet diameter.
3. Experiment
The cactus, Mammillaria elongata var. intertexta, is purchased
from the Chuntian flower market, Xian, China. Considering the
complicated name of this species of the cactus, the word cactus
is used in the following text. The carefully selected spines are
washed by ultrasonic cleaning machine for 10 min at room tem-
perature and dried in a vacuum oven at room temperature for
10 min before experiments.
199
ð1Þ
Fig. 1. Cross-sectional view of a droplet (representing with the shaded region) on a
spine.
The deionized water (DI) and xanthan solutions are employed
to produce Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluid droplets. Two
xanthan solutions with different shear rheology characteristics
are prepared at 200 wppm (X200) and 500 wppm (X500). We use
a magnetic stirrer (Dalong, MS-S, China) to mix deionized water
ð2Þ and xanthan gum particles for 24 h. Then the xanthan solutions
are standing for 12 h before experiments.
The spines are carefully fixed on the sample frame. A flat-tipped
metal hub needle (Hamilton, gage 30, Switzerland) is applied to
generate well controlled droplets (with an equivalent diameter of
0.68 mm ± 0.036 mm). We use a manipulator to control the motion
and sample introduction of the needle. Dynamic droplet behavior
is visualized with a high speed camera (Phantom Miro M110,
USA) to capture images at 1500 frames/s. The experiments are con-
ducted under room temperature of 19 ± 0.5 °C.
The surface tension of the DI-water, X200 and X500 is measured
using the automatic tension apparatus (Aiji, ZL-20, China) with
ð3Þ 71.9, 71.5 and 71.2 N/m, respectively. Liquid viscosity with shear
rate ranging from 100 to 2000 s1 is measured with the rotational
viscometer (Brookfield, R/S+CC, USA) and the viscosity curves are
fitted. The power law indexes of X200 and X500 are 0.8205 and
0.7232, respectively, while the consistency indexes are 0.0054
and 0.0150, respectively. The densities of DI-water, X200 and
ð4Þ X500 are 998, 995 and 995 kg/m3, respectively. The contact angle
and surface energy of solid–vapor interface are measured by the
optical contact angle measurement apparatus (Powereach,
JC2000D5, China). Geometry parameters are measured from the
photographs captured by the camera using Image-J software.
ð5Þ
4. Results and discussion
First, we fix a single spine on a sample frame at different placed
angles (90°, 90° and 0°) to examine the effect of spine direction
on the movement behavior of three types of droplets (DI-water,
X200 and X500). The base diameter of the spine is 0.38 mm and
the half-cone angle is 3.8°. For each direction, all types of droplets
drive directionally from the tip to the base of the spine. Typical
spontaneous motions of the X200 droplet are illustrated in Fig. 2.
Experimental results show that the droplet moves towards the
direction of increasing cross section of the spine no matter what
angle the spine is placed. It is measured that the X200 droplet takes
the same time 0.01 s to move the same distance 2.39 mm along the
longitudinal direction of the spine at different angles (90°, 90°
and 0°). The calculated Bond numbers of DI-water, X200 and
X500 droplets are 1.96  105, 1.97  105 and 1.98  105,
respectively. Here the characteristic length is the base diameter
of the spine of 0.38 mm. The Bond numbers are much less than
one, indicating that the surface tension dominates compared to
the body force. The results show that the direction of spines has
little effect on the droplet motion and the gravity force can be
neglected. Therefore, only the horizontally placed spine of z coordi-
nate from 0 to 0.005 m is studied in the following text.
200 L. Guo, G.H. Tang / International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 84 (2015) 198–202

(a )

( b)

(c)

Fig. 2. Directional X200 droplet motion on the cactus spine placed at various placed angles. Scale bar: 2 mm.

To explore the structure of spines in detail, we use a field emis-
sion scanning electron microscope (FESEM, Hitachi-SU8010, Japan)
to observe the structure of an individual spine (shown in Fig. 3).
The spine is tapered in shape, thus the gradient of the Laplace pres-
sure established along the length can drive the droplet moving.
Furthermore, aligned microgrooves and sub-microgrooves are also
observed. The spacing of microgrooves is nearly the same while the
sub-microgrooves are getting narrower from the tip (Fig. 3(f)) to
the base (Fig. 3(d)) of the spine. Oriented barbs are also observed
in the middle part of the spine (Fig. 3(e)). The microstructures, such
as microgrooves, sub-microgrooves and barbs, make the base have
a rougher surface than the tip. For intrinsically hydrophilic sur-
faces, the contact angle gets smaller as the surface becomes
rougher according to the Wenzel’s equation [28]. Thus, the droplet
close to the base is more hydrophilic than that near the tip. The
gradient of wettability contributes to another driving factor of
the droplet directional motion. Meanwhile, like the butterfly wings
reported by Zheng et al. [29], the aligned microgrooves can
generate an anisotropic contact angle in the direction parallel or
perpendicular to the microgrooves, enhancing the directional

Fig. 3. SEM images of the cactus surface structures. The single spine is divided into three parts: the base part (a), the middle part (b) and the tip part (c). Partially enlarged
details of the three parts are shown in (d), (e) and (f), respectively. Scale bars of 200 lm for a–c and 10 lm for d–f.
 L. Guo, G.H. Tang / International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 84 (2015) 198–202 201

movement of the droplet along the microgrooves on the spines. 1.2

The subtle integration of these structures may contribute to the DI-water
high efficiency for driving droplet. 1.0 X200
X500
For further investigation, the normalized Gibbs free energy, Gn,
is plotted as a function of xn in Fig. 4 to explore the directional 0.8
droplet motion theoretically. The normalized Gibbs free energy
diminishes from the tip to the base of the spine, which results in 0.6

v, m/s
the dimensional movement of the droplet. The slope of the curve
Gn for the deionized water on the cactus spine is much larger than 0.4
that calculated by Michielsen et al. [9]. The reason might be that
the studied cactus spines have microstructures of microgrooves, 0.2
sub-microgrooves and barbs, which further enhance the spontane-
ous movement of droplets apart from the driving factor of the 0.0
0.02 0.04 0.06 0.08 0.10 0.12
Laplace pressure that the conical fibers [9] and the present cactus xn
spines have in common. It can also be seen from Fig. 4 that Gn of
the deionized water is larger than that of X200 and both are larger Fig. 5. Velocity as a function of droplet position for DI water, X200 and X500
than that of X500, which is attributed to the larger surface tension droplets.
of the deionized water than both X200 and X500.
Fig. 5 presents the velocity of three types of droplets along the
spine as a function of xn. We can see that the velocity of all the
three types of droplets decreases along the spine. The deionized
water droplet moves the fastest along the spine while the X500 0.40
droplet with the largest concentration moves the slowest. Note ΔGn En Wvn
0.35
that the speed of the spontaneous droplet motion arising from
the gradient of wettability is typically in the range of micrometers 0.30
to millimeters per second [17]. However, the maximum velocity of
0.25
the deionized water, X200 and X500 observed in the present
experiment reaches 1.17, 0.96 and 0.34 m/s, respectively. The aver- 0.20
age velocity of the three types of droplets is 0.19, 0.10 and 0.05 m/
0.15
s, respectively. The increased one to two orders of droplet velocity
compared to the results in [17] exhibits the high efficiency of con- 0.10
ical spines for driving droplets.
0.05
To explore the difference behaved by various droplets, energy
analysis of the directional movement is made. Fig. 6 presents the 0.00
energy variation of these three types of droplets. For all the three DI-water X200 X500
types of droplets, the free energy reduction is nearly equal to the Fig. 6. Energy analysis of the directional motion for DI water, X200 and X500
sum of Wvn and En, i.e., DGn  W vn þ En . In the process of the direc- droplets.
tional movement, the decreased Gibbs free energy transforms into
the kinetic energy of the droplet and also overcomes the friction
loss induced by the viscosity force. It is also seen from Fig. 6 that
5. Conclusions
both DGn and Wvn become smaller as the solution concentration
gets larger. However, the reduction of DGn is larger than the reduc-
The behavior of a single droplet on the conical spine has been
tion of Wvn, thus the gap between DGn and Wvn gets smaller and
experimentally studied for both Newtonian and non-Newtonian
therefore the kinetic energy diminishes. As a result, the droplet
fluids. We find that both the deionized water and the shear-
velocity decreases as the solution concentration gets higher (see
thinning xanthan solution droplets move directionally from the
Fig. 5).
tip to the base of the spine, which is irrelevant with the direction
of the spine. The Gibbs free energy reduces as the spine cross
section increases, interpreting the droplet directional motion. The
decreased Gibbs free energy transforms into the kinetic energy,
2.6 which overcomes the friction loss due to the viscosity force.
2.4 The shear-thinning non-Newtonian droplet moves slower due to
2.2 the increased viscosity loss. The maximum velocity observed in
2.0 the experiment for water droplet is 1.17 m/s, exhibiting the high
efficiency of conical spines on driving droplets.
1.8
Gn

1.6 DI-water
X200
Conflicts of interest
1.4
X500
1.2 Michielsen et al. [9] None declared.
1.0
0.8 Acknowledgments
0.6
0.00 0.02 0.04 0.06 0.08 0.10 0.12 This work was supported by the National Basic Research Pro-
xn
gram of China (973 Program) under Grant No. 2011CB710702
Fig. 4. Normalized Gibbs free energy as a function of droplet position for DI water, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant
X200 and X500 droplets. No. 51222604.
202 L. Guo, G.H. Tang / International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 84 (2015) 198–202

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