Harnessing Fluid Interfacial Instabilities for Pattern Manufacturing: Fundamentals, Strategies, and Applications

The ever-growing demand for highly integrated and multifunctional devices calls for next-generation surface patterning technologies with inherent scalability, precision, and cost-effectiveness. Fluid interfacial instabilities, a class of self-organizing processes characterized by the spontaneous formation of complex, periodic architectures, offer a scalable, bottom-up complement to traditional top-down lithography. Although the fundamental hydrodynamics of these phenomena are well-established, their translation into deterministic manufacturing remains insufficiently unaddressed. This review bridges this gap by establishing a comprehensive “Mechanism-Methodologies-Multifunctional applications” (M³) framework, which integrates the underlying physics of various interfacial instabilities, methodologies for their controlled exploitation, and diverse applications of the resulting patterns. We begin by critically assessing the merits of instability-mediated manufacturing, focusing on its strategic advantages and intrinsic limitations relative to conventional patterning techniques. We then classify the physical origins of key instabilities and introduce a unified map to chart their spatiotemporal evolution. To direct the practical implementation of these processes, we develop an engineering regime map that correlates final pattern outcomes with critical inputs such as interface fluctuations, external driving forces, and fluid rheology. Finally, we explore the promising prospects of these approaches in microgravity environments, where suppressed buoyancy and altered fluid dynamics offer potentials in microstructure fabrication for aeronautical and astronautical applications.