The use of spontaneous self-assembly, as a lithographic tool and as an external field-free means to construct well-ordered and intriguing patterns, has received much attention due to its ease of producing complex, large-scale structures with small feature sizes. An extremely simple route to highly-ordered, complex structures is the evaporative self-assembly of nonvolatile solutes (e.g., polymers, nanoparticles, carbon nanotubes, and DNA) from a sessile droplet on a solid substrate. To date, a few studies have elegantly demonstrated that self-organized nanoscale, microscale, and hierarchically structured patterns have been readily obtained from sophisticated control of droplet evaporation. These include convective assembly in evaporating menisci, the alignment of nanomaterials by programmed dip coating and controlled anisotrophic wetting/dewetting processes, facile microstructuring of functional polymers by the """"Breath Figure"""" method, controlled evaporative self-assembly in confined geometries, etc. This book is unique in this regard in providing a wide spectrum of recent experimental and theoretical advances in evaporative self-assembly techniques. The ability to engineer an evaporative self-assembly process that yields a broad range of complex, well-ordered and intriguing structures with small feature sizes composed of polymers of nanocrystals of different size and shapes as well as DNA over large areas offers tremendous potential for applications in electronics, optoelectronics, photonics, sensors, information processing and data storage devices, nanotechnology, high-throughput drug discovery, chemical detection, combinatorical chemistry and biotechnology.
Description-Table Of Contents
1. Drying a sessile droplet: imaging and analysis of transport and deposition patterns. 1.1. Introduction. 1.2. The basic droplet-drying phenomenon. 1.3. Mathematic models. 1.4. Vapor phase transport. 1.5. Height-averaged radial velocity. 1.6. Full flow solution without Marangoni effect. 1.7. Full flow solutions with Marangoni effect. 1.8. Manipulation of flow for patterned depositions. 1.9. Conclusions and outlook -- 2. Convective assembly of patterned media. 2.1. Introduction. 2.2. Review of prevailing mechanisms in convective assembly. 2.3. Spontaneously patterned colloidal structures. 2.4. Templating of colloidal structures using patterned substrates. 2.5. Open issues. 2.6. Conclusions and outlook -- 3. Materials deposition in evaporating menisci - Fundamentals and engineering applications of the convective assembly process. 3.1. Introduction and background to convective assembly. 3.2. Engineering of the process of convective assembly at high volume fractions. 3.3. Convective assembly with particles having multimodal sizes and polydispersity. 3.4. Scaling rules for convective assembly. 3.5. Convective assembly with anisotropic particles. 3.6. Template directed assembly and applications. 3.7. Conclusions and outlook -- 4. Organized structures formation driven by interfacial instability at the three phase contact line: Langmuir-Blodgett patterning. 4.1. Introduction. 4.2. Fabrication of controllable mesostructures based on lipids. 4.3. Transfer induce pattern formation of nanoparticles and other materials. 4.4. Templated self-assembly of molecules and nanoparticles. 4.5. Pattern transfer - From chemical to topographical patterns. 4.6. Conclusions and outlook -- 5. Patterning and assembling nanomaterials by dip coating. 5.1. Introduction. 5.2. Contact line deposition by dip coating. 5.3. Langmuir-Blodgett assembly of nanomaterials with dip coating. 5.4. Conclusions and outlook -- 6. Fabrication of nano/microstructured organic polymer films using condensation: self-assembly of breath figures. 6.1. Introduction. 6.2. Historical aspects. 6.3. Current state review. 6.4. Breath figure templated assembly. 6.5. Summary and issues to be resolved -- 7. Self-assembly of highly ordered structures enabled by controlled evaporation of confined microfluids. 7.1. Introduction. 7.2. Evaporative self-assembly in confined geometries. 7.3. Conclusions and outlook -- 8. Guided assembly by surface controlled dewetting and evaporation. 8.1. Introduction. 8.2. Generating stretched DNA arrays on a microwell surface. 8.3. Simulation of flow patterns on a microwell surface. 8.4. Generating functionalized nanowire arrays on a micropillar surface. 8.5. Generating micro/nanoparticle and hybrid micro/nanoparticle-nanowire arrays on a micropillar surface. 8.6. Conclusions and outlook.
