Spatially selective drop-motion programming using metamaterials

Motion control of droplets has generated much attention for its application to microfluidics, where precisely controlling small fluid volumes is an imperative requirement. Mechanical vibrations can induce controllable depinning and activation of a variety of drop-motion regimes. However, existing vibration-based strategies establish homogeneous rigid-body dynamics on the entire substrate, thus lacking any form of spatial heterogeneity and tuning. Addressing this limitation, elastic metamaterials provide an ideal platform to achieve spectrally and spatially selective drop-motion control. This capability results from the intrinsic ability of metamaterials to attenuate vibrations in selected frequency bands and regions of an elastic domain. In this work, we experimentally demonstrate a variety of droplet motion capabilities on the surface of a vibrating metaplate endowed with locally resonant stubs. The experiments leverage the design reconfigurability of a LEGO^® component-enabled prototyping platform, which allows us to switch in an agile manner between different configurations of resonators. We use laser vibrometry measurements with high spatial resolution to capture the spatial variability of the metaplate response. Beyond the discipline-specific boundaries, this work begins to illustrate a broader employment of elastic metamaterials in applications where their signature wave control capability is not the end goal, but rather an enabling tool for other more complex multiphysical effects.