Soft surfaces offer rewritable way to guide, sort and merge droplets

Executive Briefing & Key Highlights

Mechanical and aerospace engineering professor Anupam Pandey's research team has found that microscopic folds in soft materials can act like tiny, programmable traffic gates for liquid droplets. The folds can stop droplets, let them pass or merge them together without surface coatings or additional hardware. Remarkably, the droplets never touch the fold. They sense it from a distance and slow down