Electrowetting: a recent outbreak

This paper deals with recent developments of electrowetting, i.e. the facility of modifying the spreading of a liquid on a substrate by bringing electrostatic charges on the latter. This field of research is currently seeing a revival, particularly since the interspersing of an insulator to prevent charge leaking from the substrate interface, greatly improves this phenomenon. Such electrowetting on an insulator coated electrode (EICE) concerns the majority of recent work. Some of the present studies concern the limitations of this phenomenon, whose physics is not yet fully understood, whilst others exploit EICE, either for various academic purposes or in practical situations. These are presented in the last paragraph, as well as applications of classical electrowetting.