A new tool for controlling reactions in microrobots and microreactors

In a new paper, Thomas Russell and postdoctoral fellow Ganhua Xie, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, report that they have used capillary forces to develop a simple method for producing self-assembling hanging droplets of an aqueous polymer solution from the surface of a second aqueous polymer solution in well-ordered arrays. 'These hanging droplets have potential applications in functional microreactors, micromotors and biomimetic microrobots,' they explain.