Ian Wark Research Institute
ARC Special Research Centre
ARC Special Research Centre
Research Area: Physics, chemistry, surface engineering, soft
matter
Supervisor: Dr Craig
Priest
Description: The way liquids wet solid surfaces directly impacts
the performance of many natural processes, commercial devices and
industrial applications. In the most common applications, such as
mineral and oil recovery, printing technologies, and “non-stick”
coatings, the solid surface is non-ideal, exhibiting roughness (bumps
and grooves) and/or chemical heterogeneity (patches), which leads to
rather complex wetting (or non-wetting) effects. Our understanding of
these effects has progressed rapidly in recent times, aided by the
ability to fabricate almost any surface geometry or chemistry; however,
these studies have typically focused on the final state of spreading
(static wetting) with much less attention on the dynamics of the process
(dynamic wetting).
Dynamic wetting is far more relevant to the majority of real-world applications, where liquids collide with or travel over non-ideal surfaces at various velocities, yet we know very little about how these non-ideal surface features impact dynamic wetting events. This project will employ high-speed optical microscopy and the precise fabrication of well-defined microstructures to understand how surface features impact the movement of liquids on non-ideal surfaces, with particular attention to the velocity limits of liquid movement in microfluidic devices.
Techniques
