Beam deflector and position sensor using electrowetting and mechanical wetting of sandwiched droplets

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

<P>Electrowetting (EW) offers a facile manipulation of a liquid droplet on a surface, and several different systems have been suggested to utilize EW on various applications. In this letter, the manipulation of an electrolyte droplet with a floating movable substrate was investigated on a solid substrate. Two types of approaches were made; firstly, we controlled the vertical position of a floating substrate using EW property of droplets. The tilting angle of a floating substrate can be precisely controlled along two orthogonal directions independently, which can be used to devise a beam deflector. In the other case, mechanical wetting of droplets via external pressure was used to detect the position of a floating substrate; this position sensor has at least four orders of magnitude higher sensitivity than the conventional position sensor based on capacitance.</P>