Shaping Interfaces Using Mechanical Forcing
Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Department Seminar Series
2/17 (Tuesday) Noon – 1:00 pm JAB773
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Shaping Interfaces Using Mechanical Forcing
Alban Sauret
Research Scientist
CNRS - SVI
France
From microfluidics to biophysics, interfaces have a significant impact on the properties of multiphasic systems. In this seminar, I will present three examples of recent work showing that interfaces can be controlled using mechanical effects.
The first part of this seminar will focus on microfluidics. In recent years, an alternative to classical oil-water-based emulsions has been proposed: all-aqueous emulsions. Due to their biocompatibility, these systems have shown great promises as templates for fabricating biomaterials. In this talk, we will discuss how to overcome this new microfluidic challenge to generate controlled emulsions. We will then consider the wetting of fibers by a liquid and demonstrate the influence of important physical parameters on the resulting morphology of the liquid. In particular, I will show that the possibility to tune the morphology has important implications for drying processes in fibrous media. Finally, in the last part of the talk we will try to answer to the following question: why does coffee spill more easily than beer? Our study indicates that the addition of foam at an air/liquid interface can be used to passively damp the sloshing, i.e. the oscillation of the free surface, and to avoid the spilling of the liquid.
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Biosketch
Alban Sauret is currently a research scientist at CNRS in France. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Physics from ENS Lyon (France). After that, he received his PhD in mechanical engineering from Aix-Marseille University (France). He was a fellow of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Program at Woods Hole in 2012 and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University with Prof. H. A. Stone in 2013-2014. He is currently working in the "Surfaces, Glass and Interfaces" laboratory that is a joint CNRS and Saint-Gobain research center.