Welcome to our lab!
We like to uncover fundamental physical mechanisms behind new fluid mechanics phenomena, through table-top experiments and mathematical modeling. In fact, distilling complex problems into tractable, simplified ones is our passion and a bit of a specialty of ours…. The physical systems we consider tend to be wide-ranging: interfacial dynamics of suspension flows, inertia-driven droplets, two-phase flows through porous media, and dynamics of particle rafts.
While we are motivated by applications in energy, environment, and materials science, our work is quite fundamental and is genuinely driven by our desire to understand the physical world that involves fluids. Feel free to look around and see if anything interests you. Also feel free to contact us if you have any questions!
Formation and collapse of a granular raft
Known as the Cheerio's effect, particles on the fluid-fluid interface spontaneously form aggregates through capillary interactions and form...
Microdroplet dynamics inside porous media
In collaboration with Donaldson Inc., we are investigating the dynamics of microdroplet inside complex filter media through microfluidics ...
Droplet depinning in wind
Funded by NSF-CBET (Fluid Dynamics), we investigated the dynamics of a partially-wetting droplet under high-Re wind, by combining wind-tunnel experiments and mathematical modeling. In particular, to simulate the interaction of partially-wetting droplets in wind...
Gas migration in a soft granular material
In collaboration with Prof. Chris MacMinn (Oxford), we studied two-phase flows inside soft porous media by injecting air into a vertical, quasi-2D packing of soft hydrogel beads saturated with water. The use of highly deformable and nearly transparent hydrogel particles...
Particle-induced viscous fingering
To isolate the coupling between fluid-fluid interfaces and suspended particles, we experimentally demonstrated that the suspension-air interface becomes unstable and leads to the formation of particle clusters, when a particle-oil mixture radially...
A falling armored droplet
Droplets coated with a protective armor of particles are relevant in stabilization of emulsions and foams that are widely used in many industrial applications, such as pharmaceutical, food, and cosmetics. These armored droplets can form by...