Microfluidics Enabled Studies on Complex Fluids and Materials Sciences

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department Seminar Series

Jing Fan
Department of Mechanical Engineering
CUNY

Due to its capability of manipulating fluids in a highly controllable manner, capillary-based microfluidics has proven to be powerful in developing novel functional materials. Moreover, microfluidics-enabled products such as the drops and microcapsules may serve as or construct experimental model systems to facilitate fundamental scientific research and practical technology development. In this talk, I discuss three examples to demonstrate this research strategy. In the first example, we develop chemical-responsive elastic microcapsules and use them to study the effect of targeted payload delivery for controlling two-phase flow in porous media. The second example is about the self-organized 3D photonic superstructure from photo-responsive cholesteric liquid crystal drops. Thirdly, I introduce our study on the crystalline structures of compressed monodisperse emulsions.

Biosketch

Dr. Jing Fan joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at CCNY in January 2016. Her current research interests focus on the experimental studies in complex fluids and soft materials. Topics of interest include the transport phenomena in biological tissues, design and fabrication of functional porous structures, enhanced oil recovery and flood conformance control, advanced materials for biomedical and optical applications, physics and applications of microfluidics, foam and emulsion physics, and synthesis of functional particulate materials. Prior to joining CCNY, Dr. Fan was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University working on microfluidics for materials production, multiphase flow in porous media, and many other topics related to the dynamics of complex fluids. Her PhD study in The University of Hong Kong was about multiscale modeling as well as computational heat transfer and fluid dynamics.