Innovating ionic liquids as repairable electronics for liquid robots

When I read the paper of“Crystal-Confined Freestanding Ionic Liquids for Reconfigurable and Repairable Electronics”that was published on Nature Communications(Nat.Commun.2019,10,547),I felt excited as it led to a new application of ionic liquids in addition to the enormous studies on chemical synthesis,catalysis,gas adsorption,processing biomass,and electrochemistry.This paper intended to mimic the liquid robot which was a classic character in the famous movie of Terminator 2:Judgment Day.The authors successfully exploited an approach to overcome the leakage problem of ionic liquids in the absence of encapsulation layers.It seems that ionic liquids would be one of the promising materials for green electronics with less production of electronic waste.In these regards,I would be delighted to write a highlight for this innovative work and hopefully it may raise more interests in the areas of ionic liquids.

Quantitative research of the liquid film characteristics in upward vertical gas, oil and water flows

The study of liquid film characteristics in multiphase flow is a very important research topic, however,the characteristics of the liquid film around Taylor bubble structure in gas, oil and water three-phase flow are not clear. In the present study, a novel liquid film sensor is applied to measure the distributed signals of the liquid film in three-phase flow. Based on the liquid film signals, the liquid film characteristics including the structural characteristics and the nonlinear dynamics characteristics in three-phase flows are investigated for the first time. The structural characteristics including the proportion, the appearance frequency and the thickness of the liquid film are obtained and the influences of the liquid and gas superficial velocities and the oil content on them are investigated. To investigate the nonlinear dynamics characteristics of the liquid film with the changing flow conditions, the entropy analysis is introduced to successfully uncover and quantify the dynamic complexity of the liquid film behavior.

Design and Optimization of Photonic Crystal Fiber for Liquid Sensing Applications

This paper proposes a hexagonal photonic crystal fiber （H-PCF） structure with high relative sensitivity for liquid sensing; in which both core and cladding are microstructures. Numerical investigation is carried out by employing the full vectorial finite element method （FEM）. The analysis has been done in four stages of the proposed structure. The investigation shows that the proposed structure achieves higher relative sensitivity by increasing the diameter of the innermost ring air holes in the cladding. Moreover, placing a single channel instead of using a group of tiny channels increases the relative sensitivity effectively. Investigating the effects of different parameters, the optimized structure shows significantly higher relative sensitivity with a low confinement loss.

Optimized guided mode resonant structure as thermooptic sensor and liquid crystal tunable filter

Applicability of guided mode resonant structures to tunable optical filtering and sensing is demonstrated using nematic liquid crystals. As a sensor, a minimum refractive index detectivity of 10^-5 is demonstrated while as a tunable filter, tunability range of few tens of nanometers with 2-nm bandwidth is presented. The optimum design is achieved by maximizing the evanescent field region in the analyte which maximizes the overlap integral. The device can be operated in reflection or transmission modes at normal incidence. It can also be operated at a single wavelength by measuring the angular profile of the light beam.

High sensitivity D-shaped hole fiber temperature sensor based on surface plasmon resonance with liquid filling

A high sensitivity D-shaped hole double-cladding fiber temperature sensor based on surface plasmon resonance(SPR)is designed and investigated by a full-vector finite element method.Within the D-shaped hole doublecladding fiber,the hollow D-section is coated with gold film and then injected in a high thermo-optic coefficient liquid to realize the high temperature sensitivity for the fiber SPR temperature sensor.The numerical simulation results show that the peaking loss of the D-shaped hole double-cladding fiber SPR is hugely influenced by the distance between the D-shaped hole and fiber core and by the thickness of the gold film,but the temperature sensitivity is almost insensitive to the above parameters.When the thermo-optic coefficient is -2.8×10^(-4)∕℃,the thickness of the gold film is 47 nm,and the distance between the D-shaped hole and fiber core is 5μm,the temperature sensitivity of the D-shaped hole fiber SPR sensor can reach to -3.635 nm∕℃.

Ultrasensitive liquid level sensor based on slice-shaped composite long period fiber grating

In this paper,a novel liquid level sensor with ultra-high sensitivity is proposed.The proposed sensor is configured by a sliceshaped composite long period fiber grating(SSC-LPFG).The SSC-LPFG is prepared by polishing two opposite sides of a composite multimode-single-mode-multimode fiber structure using a CO;laser.The method improves the sensitivity of the sensor to external environment.Based on the simulation calculation,a liquid level sensor with a length of 3 mm is designed.The experimental transmission spectrum agrees well with the simulation result.The experimental results show that the sensitivity reaches 7080 pm/mm in the liquid level range of 0-1400 μm in water.The temperature sensitivity is24.52 pm/℃ in the range of 20℃-90℃.Due to the ultra-high sensitivity,good linearity,and compact structure,the SSC-LPFG has potential application in the field of high-Drecision liquid level measurement.

Linear Liquid Responses of Morpho Butterfly Structural Color： Experiment and Modeling

This paper investigates the selective liquid response for Morpho didius butterfly wing scales and propose an optical model to explain the effect of different components on the liquid response. It is found out that the reason of the selective response is that the liquid media forms nanometre-thick films between ridge-lamellae nanostructures and changes the constructive interference wavelength. There is linear relation between the structural color of ridge-lamellae structure and index of liquid background media. The reason of vapor＇s responses is that the nanometre-thick liquid fi lms on ridge-lamellae nanostructures change the constructive interference wavelength. These liquid films are formed due to vapor adsorption. Therefore,the selective linear liquid response can be applied to design nano-engineered photonic liquid and vapor sensors.