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  • Open Access

Drops on architected elastic substrates: A repertoire of regimes at the turn of a knob

Sergio Britto1, Zakari Kujala2, Sungyon Lee2, and Stefano Gonella1,*

  • *Contact author: sgonella@umn.edu
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Phys. Rev. Research 7, 033095 – Published 28 July, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/9ssq-gjhv

Abstract

Drops on a vibrating substrate can experience a variety of motion regimes, including directional motion and climbing. The key ingredient to elicit these regimes is simultaneously activating the in-plane and out-of-plane degrees of freedom of the substrate with the proper phase difference. This is typically achieved by imposing a prescribed rigid-body motion of the entire substrate. However, this framework is unable to establish different motion conditions in different regions of the substrate, thus lacking the precious spatial selectivity necessary to elicit complex drop control patterns. Challenging this paradigm, we leverage the inherent elasticity of the substrate to provide the required in-plane and out-of-plane modal characteristics and spatial diversity. To this end, we design architected substrates exhibiting a rich landscape of deformation modes, and we exploit their multimodal response to switch between drop motion regimes and select desired spatial patterns, using the excitation frequency as our tuning parameter.

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Phys. Rev. Research 7, 033095– Published 28 July, 2025
  • Received 27 March 2025
  • Accepted 26 June 2025
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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