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The degradation of the hemi-wicking property of superhydrophilic high-energy surfaces due to contaminant adsorption from the ambient atmosphere is well documented. This degradation compromises the performance of such surfaces, thus…

This paper investigates the self-cleansing performance of an airlift pump with a u-bend. For this purpose, an experimental test model is used to assess the effect of air supply on the pump's ability to lift water and remove particles under…

An electric field applied to a droplet impinging on a hydrophobic surface has an extensive variety of applications, including ant-icing, heat transfer enhancement, self-cleaning, droplet manipulation, and electrostatic spraying. The present…

In the present work, we developed a sustainable and effective antimicrobial surface film based on Micro-Fibrillated Cellulose. The resulting porous cellulose thin film is barely noticeable to human eyes due to its sub-micron thickness, of…

Foam is an industrially important form of matter, commonly deployed to clean objects and even our own skin, thanks to its ability to absorb oil and particles into its interior. To clean a large area, a foam is spread over a substrate, but…

Stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) using solid particles has been proposed as an alternative to sulfate aerosols for solar radiation modification, but practical deployment faces challenges in efficiently deagglomerating and dispersing…

We investigate the sliding dynamics of a millimeter-sized particle trapped in a horizontal soap film. Once released, the particle moves toward the center of the film in damped oscillations. We study experimentally and model the forces…

Biofilms are bacterial aggregates encased in a self-produced polymeric matrix which attach to moist surfaces and are extremely resistant to chemicals and antibiotics. Recent experiments show that their structure is defined by the interplay…

The surface of ultra-thin materials plays a crucial role in determining the properties. This is particularly important in two-dimensional (2D) materials where the surface-bulk distinction is no longer present. While mechanical cleaning of…

Many swimming bacteria naturally inhabit confined environments, yet how confinement influences their swimming behaviors remains unclear. Here, we combine experiments, continuum modeling and particle-based simulations to investigate…

How motile bacteria move near a surface is a problem of fundamental biophysical interest and is key to the emergence of several phenomena of biological, ecological and medical relevance, including biofilm formation. Solid boundaries can…

When an open tube of small diameter touches a bubble of a larger diameter, the bubble spontaneously shrinks and pushes a soap film in the tube. We characterize the dynamics for different bubble sizes and number of soap films in the tube. We…

Inspired by the natural defence strategies of insect wings and plant leaves, nanostructured surfaces have emerged as a promising tool in various fields, including engineering, biomedical sciences, and materials science to combat bacterial…

Many two-phase materials suffer from grain-growth due to the energy cost which is associated with the interface that separates both phases. While our understanding of the driving forces and the dynamics of grain growth in different…

Near-field hydrodynamic interactions between bacteria and no-slip solid surfaces are the main mechanism underlying surface entrapment of bacteria. In this study, we employ a chiral two-body model to simulate bacterial dynamics near the…

Many porous media are mixtures of inert and reactive materials, manifesting spatio-chemical heterogeneity. We study the evolution of scalar transport in a chemically heterogeneous material that mimics a green roof soil substrate,…

This paper proposes improvements to the physically-based surface triangulation method, bubble meshing. The method simulates physical bubbles to automatically generate mesh vertices, resulting in high-quality Delaunay triangles. Despite its…

Robotic manipulation of deformable objects remains a challenging task. One such task is to iron a piece of cloth autonomously. Given a roughly flattened cloth, the goal is to have an ironing plan that can iteratively apply a regular iron to…

We propose a computational framework to study the growth and spread of bacterial biofilms on interfaces, as well as the action of antibiotics on them. Bacterial membranes are represented by boundaries immersed in a fluid matrix and subject…

Surface contamination not only influences but in some cases even dominates the measured properties of two-dimensional materials. Although different cleaning methods are often used for contamination removal, commonly used spectroscopic…