Clockwise from top-left: 3D Dye mixing in a strirred tank, elastic instabilities in microchannels, Newtonian fluid drop breakup, polymeric drop breakup.

The lab explores the fields of Transport Phenomena and Soft-Condensed Matter, particularly fluid mechanics, microfluidics, and complex fluids.

And, what are complex fluids? Complex fluids are a broad class of materials that are usually homogeneous at the macroscopic scale and disordered at the microscopic scale, but possess structure at an intermediate scale (e.g., colloids, blood, and polymers). Such fluids exhibit many useful properties stemming from the variety of structures at the intermediate scale.  They are also 'soft', in the sense that they flow or distort easily in response to shear or other external forces.  Understanding the physical/chemical forces controlling the structural scale of complex fluids in order to engineer materials with unique properties is an exciting research field for engineers, physicists, chemists, and biologists.