Insights into the mechanics of pure and bacteria-laden sessile whole blood droplet evaporation

We study the mechanics of evaporation and precipitate formation in pure and bacteria-laden sessile whole blood droplets in the context of disease diagnostics. Using experimental and theoretical analysis, we show that the evaporation process has three stages based on evaporation rate. In the first stage, edge evaporation results in a gelated contact line along the periphery through a sol–gel phase transition. The intermediate stage consists of a gelated front propagating radially inwards due to capillary flow and droplet height regression in pinned mode, forming a wet-gel phase. We unearthed that the gelation of the entire droplet occurs in the second stage, and the wet-gel formed contains trace amounts of water. In the final slowest stage, the wet gel transforms into a dry gel, leading to desiccation-induced stress forming diverse crack patterns in the precipitate. Slow evaporation in the final stage is quantitatively measured using evaporation of trace water and associated transient delamination of the precipitate. Using the axisymmetric lubrication approximation, we compute the transient droplet height profile and the erythrocytes concentration for the first two stages of evaporation. We show that the precipitate thickness profile computed from the theoretical analysis conforms to the optical profilometry measurements. We show that the drop evaporation rate and final dried residue pattern do not change appreciably within the parameter variation of the bacterial concentration typically found in bacterial infection of living organisms. However, at exceedingly high bacterial concentrations, the cracks formed in the coronal region deviate from the typical radial cracks found in lower concentrations.