Research plan proposed by J. Diez and L. Kondic

Instabilities in thin liquid films

The subject of this plan is within the field of microfluidics. Recently, new strategies have been developed to manipulate very small volumes of liquids as required, for instance, in the manufacturing of low-cost portable devices called 'lab-on-a-chip'. These devices, which are of millimetric size and contain a large number of fluid paths/channels in the scale of microns, are intended to perform tasks of chemical and/or biological analysis (biotechnology). All of these techniques are still very new, and present investigations aim to describe the relevant physical mechanisms, as well as to find comparative advantages in order to propose the most suitable configurations appropriate for technological applications. The knowledge of the type of instabilities that may appear in these flows and how to control them is of fundamental importance to determine the feasibility of a given microfluidic design.

The research plan involves carrying out laboratory experiments, numerical simulations, and development of physical/mathematical models in order to study the dynamics of a specific fluid configuration relevant to the applications mentioned above. Experimental techniques involve using optical methods to measure fluid shapes, including thickness profiles, contact line geometry, slopes, contact angles, etc. Numerical simulations involve further development of existing routines, as well as of new computational methods.