In late December 2019, a cluster of cases of pneumonia of unknown etiology were reported linked to a market in Wuhan, China
. The causative agent was identified as the species Severe acute ...respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus and was named SARS-CoV-2 (ref.
). By 16 April the virus had spread to 185 different countries, infected over 2,000,000 people and resulted in over 130,000 deaths
. In the Netherlands, the first case of SARS-CoV-2 was notified on 27 February. The outbreak started with several different introductory events from Italy, Austria, Germany and France followed by local amplification in, and later also outside, the south of the Netherlands. The combination of near to real-time whole-genome sequence analysis and epidemiology resulted in reliable assessments of the extent of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in the community, facilitating early decision-making to control local transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in the Netherlands. We demonstrate how these data were generated and analyzed, and how SARS-CoV-2 whole-genome sequencing, in combination with epidemiological data, was used to inform public health decision-making in the Netherlands.
Ring-shaped colloidal patterns on saline water films Hack, Michiel A.; van der Linden, Marjolein N.; Wijshoff, Herman ...
Journal of colloid and interface science,
November 2024, 2024-11-00, 20241101, Volume:
673
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Electrostatically stabilised colloidal particles destabilise when brought into contact with cations causing the particles to aggregate in clusters. When a drop with stabilised colloidal partices is ...deposited on a liquid film containing cations the delicate balance between the fluid-mechanical and physicochemical properties of the system governs the spreading dynamics and formation of colloidal particle clusters.
High-speed imaging and digital holographic microscopy were used to characterise the spreading process.
We reveal that a spreading colloidal drop evolves into a ring-shaped pattern after it is deposited on a thin saline water film. Clustered colloidal particles aggregate into larger trapezoidally-shaped ‘supraclusters’. Using a simple model we show that the trapezoidal shape of the supraclusters is determined by the transition from inertial spreading dynamics to Marangoni flow. These results may be of interest to applications such as wet-on-wet inkjet printing, where particle destabilisation and hydrodynamic flow coexist.
Sedimentation is a ubiquitous phenomenon across many fields of science, such as geology, astrophysics, and soft matter. Sometimes, sedimentation leads to unusual phenomena, such as the Brazil-nut ...effect, where heavier (granular) particles reside on top of lighter particles after shaking. We show experimentally that a Brazil-nut effect can be realized in a binary colloidal system of long-range repulsive charged particles driven purely by Brownian motion and electrostatics without the need for activity. Using theory, we argue that not only the mass-per-charge for the heavier particles needs to be smaller than the mass-per-charge for the lighter particles but also that at high overall density, the system can be trapped in a long-lived metastable state, which prevents the occurrence of the equilibrium Brazil-nut effect. Therefore, we envision that our work provides valuable insights into the physics of strongly interacting systems, such as partially glassy and crystalline structures. Finally, our theory, which quantitatively agrees with the experimental data, predicts that the shapes of sedimentation density profiles of multicomponent charged colloids are greatly altered when the particles are charge-regulating with more than one ion species involved. Hence, we hypothesize that sedimentation experiments can aid in revealing the type of ion adsorption processes that determine the particle charge and possibly the value of the corresponding equilibrium constants.
Evaporation of multi-component liquid mixtures in confined geometries, such as capillaries, is crucial in applications such as microfluidics, two-phase cooling devices and inkjet printing. Predicting ...the behaviour of such systems becomes challenging because evaporation triggers complex spatio-temporal changes in the composition of the mixture. These changes in composition, in turn, affect evaporation. In the present work, we study the evaporation of aqueous glycerol solutions contained as a liquid column in a capillary tube. Experiments and direct numerical simulations show three evaporation regimes characterised by different temporal evolutions of the normalised mass transfer rate (or Sherwood number $Sh$), namely $Sh (\tilde{t} ) = 1$, $Sh \sim 1/\sqrt {\tilde{t} }$ and $Sh \sim \exp (-\tilde{t} )$, where $\tilde {t}$ is a normalised time. We present a simplistic analytical model that shows that the evaporation dynamics can be expressed by the classical relation $Sh = \exp ( \tilde{t} )\,\mathrm {erfc} ( \sqrt {\tilde{t} })$. For small and medium $\tilde{t}$, this expression results in the first and second of the three observed scaling regimes, respectively. This analytical model is formulated in the limit of pure diffusion and when the penetration depth $\delta (t)$ of the diffusion front is much smaller than the length $L(t)$ of the liquid column. When $\delta \approx L$, finite-length effects lead to $Sh \sim \exp (-\tilde{t} )$, i.e. the third regime. Finally, we extend our analytical model to incorporate the effect of advection and determine the conditions under which this effect is important. Our results provide fundamental insights into the physics of selective evaporation from a multi-component liquid column.
A dynamic model is proposed for the photopolymerization of 1,6‐hexanediol diacrylate (HDDA) with the bifunctional initiator bis‐acylphosphine oxide (BAPO) in the presence of oxygen. The model tracks ...time‐varying concentrations of monomer, oxygen, and different radical end groups using ordinary differential equations. An analytical expression is derived for the mass‐transfer of oxygen. Oxygen‐related parameters are estimated using real‐time Fourier‐transform infrared reflection (FTIR) vinyl conversion data, which were collected during polymerization of HDDA films with different thicknesses, initiator concentrations, and light intensities. The resulting model and parameter estimates provide good predictions for experiments involving thin films up to 12 μm, with BAPO levels ranging from 1 to 4 wt.% and relatively low light intensities (200–1000 W/m2).