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Directed assembly of colloids is an exciting field in materials science to form structures with new symmetries and responses. Fluid interfaces have been widely exploited to make densely packed ordered structures. We have been studying how…
Transport of fluids and particles at the microscale is an important theme both in fundamental and applied science. One of the most successful approaches is to use an electric field, which requires the system to carry or induce electric…
Liquid crystalline elastomers (LCEs) are shape-changing materials that exhibit large deformations in response to applied stimuli. Local control of the orientation of LCEs spatially directs the deformation of these materials to realize…
We investigated the pressure-driven flow in curved channels at low aspect ratio, the latter being the ratio between the channel height (along the axial direction) and width (along the radial direction). The dynamics was studied numerically,…
In fully-developed pressure-driven flow, the spreading of a dissolved solute is enhanced in the flow direction due to transverse velocity variations in a phenomenon now commonly referred to as Taylor-Aris dispersion. It is well understood…
The recent advent of advanced microfabrication capabilities of microfluidic devices has driven attention towards the behavior of particles in inertial flows within microchannels for applications related to the separation and concentration…
Precise control of multiphase microfluidic flows underpins applications ranging from chemical processing to biomedical diagnostics. We investigate the response of a liquid--liquid coflow in a rectangular microchannel to an externally…
We investigate the transport dynamics of elongated microparticles in microchannel flows. While smooth-walled channels preserve the dependence of particle trajectories on initial orientation and lateral position, we show that introducing…
Viscous streaming flows generated by objects of constant curvature (circular cylinders, infinite plates) have been well understood. Yet, characterization and understanding of such flows when multiple body length-scales are involved has not…
Cavitation in fluids can severely hinder the efficiency of the associated flows. This undesired phenomenon is strongly influenced by local flow conditions, flow orientation, proximity to boundaries and liquid/gas properties at saturation.…
Liquid Crystalline Elastomers (LCEs) are active materials that are of interest due to their programmable response to various external stimuli such as light and heat. When exposed to these stimuli, the anisotropy in the response of the…
In Nature, liquids often circulate in channels textured with leaflets, cilia or porous walls that deform with the flow. These soft structures are optimized to passively control flows and inspire the design of novel microfluidic and soft…
We give a description of the intrinsic geometry of elastic distortions in three-dimensional nematic liquid crystals and establish necessary and sufficient conditions for a set of functions to represent these distortions by describing how…
Direct numerical simulations (DNS) of particle-laden turbulent flow in straight, mildly curved and strongly bent pipes are performed in which the solid phase is modelled as small heavy spherical particles. A total of seven populations of…
Liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) can undergo large reversible contractions along their nematic director upon heating or illumination. A spatially patterned director within a flat LCE sheet thus encodes a pattern of contraction on heating,…
Electrically-controlled dynamics of fluids and particles at microscales is a fascinating area of research with applications ranging from microfluidics and sensing to sorting of biomolecules. The driving mechanisms are electric forces acting…
We theoretically investigate the threshold for the director reorientation from the homeotropic state to the hybrid homeotropic-planar state and vice versa in a cell filled with a flexoelectric nematic liquid crystal (NLC) subjected to an…
We characterize the director structures in electroconvection patterns of nematic liquid crystals by means of polarising microscopy. This study was stimulated by a theory put forward by Rossberg et al. (patt-sol/9701005) who propose a…
We show that curvatures in general ambient flow profiles can align shape-asymmetric active particles, revealing a previously overlooked competition with externally applied aligning fields. Focusing on the ubiquitous case of channel flows,…
A nematic liquid crystal (NLC) layer with the anisotropy axis modulated at a fixed rate q in the transverse direction is considered. If the layer locally constitutes a half-wave plate, then the thin-screen approximation predicts 100%…