Camphor boat transports liquid marble

Abstract

Autonomous motion of solid and liquid objects, called also self-propelling, driven by various physico-chemical (mainly interfacial) phenomena attracted considerable attention from researchers in the last decade (Pimienta and Antoine, 2014, Abbott and Velev 2016). A self-propelling particle moves on its own by converting energy from the environment (e.g., chemical, electrical, thermal) into mechanical motion with respect to the surrounding fluid or solid media (Bico and Quere, 2002, Sharma et al. 2012, Ismagilov et al. 2012, Kühn et al. 2015) Various mechanisms of self-propelling have been introduced, including the use of gradient surfaces (Daniel et al. 2001, Daniel et al. 2004, Zheng et al. 2008); involving hot and cold Leidenfrost effects (Linke et al. 2006, Lagubeau et al. 2011, Agapov et al. 2014a, Agapov et al. 2014b, Kruse et al. 2015, Li et al. 2016); soluto- and thermo-capillary Marangoni flows (Paxton et al. 2006, Chen et al. 2009, Jin et al. 2012, Zhao and Pumera 2014, Ban and Nakata 2015, Bormashenko et al. 2015, Ooi et al. 2015, and exploiting micro- and nano-structured surfaces (Lagubeau et al. 2011, Kruse et al. 2015, Li et a. 2016).