Lu Zhang, Siddharth Maheshwari, Hsueh-Chia Chang, and Y. Elaine Zhu. University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN
The evaporation of a droplet often leads to the formation of a ‘coffee ring' pattern due to the outward evaporative flux which carries the nonvolatile solute to the edge of the contact line. In this talk, we present an interesting observation of multi-ring formation of DNA stain and elucidate the mechanism responsible for this unique multi-ring pattern formation upon drying DNA droplets. A high-speed fluorescence microscope is used to visualize the structure and dynamics of the multi-ring formation, which results from a pinning-depinning dynamics in contact line. At high concentrations, we observe viscous figuring as a result of the stagnation flow, which is responsible for the formation of periodic multi-rings. At lower concentration, we observe film rupture accompanied by contact-angle changes in a saw-tooth pattern, which suggests rapid contact-line receding and results in the formation of aperiodic rings. We further examine the effects of DNA concentration, droplet size and evaporation temperature on the spontaneous emergence of multi-ring patterns.