Observation of a chemical reaction in a levitating microdroplet cluster and droplet-generated music

Abstract

Ordered clusters of water droplets levitating over a heated water surface can be used as chemical microreactors and computational devices. Here we show that a chemical reaction between melamine and cyanuric acid can occur during coalescence of pairs of droplets containing these reagents and lead to the sedimentation of the product, crystals of melamine cyanurate. In rotating droplets, the crystals flash with frequencies dependent mostly on the rotational velocity of the droplets defined by the rotor of the velocity field of the air–vapor flow above the heated water surface. With the Machine Learning (ML) approach, we trace the brightness and frequencies of individual crystals and convert the frequencies into musical notes thus making a “micro-orchestra” of the levitation cluster.