Grainger College of Engineering, All Events

View Full Calendar

Micromechanics of particular soft matter: the governing role of inter-particle interactions

Event Type
Seminar/Symposium
Sponsor
Mechanical Science and Engineering
Location
4100 Sidney Lu Mechanical Engineering Building
Date
Feb 15, 2023   4:00 pm  
Speaker
Rishabh V. More, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Contact
Amy Rumsey
E-Mail
rumsey@illinois.edu
Phone
217-300-4310
Views
167
Originating Calendar
MechSE Seminars

Abstract

The advancement of humanity has been closely tied to material revolutions throughout history. Eras were named after the materials that defined them, such as the Stone, Copper, Bronze, and Iron ages. Today, we are in an era of “Soft Materials,” including particulate suspensions, colloids, polymers, surfactants, liquid crystals, and living matter. These materials are found in everyday objects, from consumer products like inks, paints, soaps, and food items to sophisticated technology like displays, batteries, and pharmaceutics. This talk focuses on particulate soft matter, viz., suspensions or colloids. Controlling the flow of suspensions is a crucial piece of an unresolved puzzle in many applications, e.g., biofuel production, solar cells, electronics cooling, and fiber-reinforced thermoplastics. Unraveling the underlying fundamental mechanometric principles that determine such materials' behavior and exploring ways to tune them is thus crucial to increase the efficiency and throughput of processes involving such particulate suspensions. To this end, we developed an experimentally validated and physics-based computational approach to study the flow of dense suspensions near jamming limits and quantitatively determined the role of inter-particle interactions on the rheology, the jamming fraction, and the microstructure of dense suspensions. These investigations elucidate the heterogeneous and hierarchical nature of structural and dynamic complexity in suspensions across scales, from microscopic to macroscopic.

 About the Speaker

Dr. Rishabh V. More is a Postdoctoral Research Associate working with Prof. Gareth H. McKinley in the Hatsopoulos Microfluidics Laboratory (HML) in the department of Mechanical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his PhD and MS from Purdue University, working with Prof. Arezoo Ardekani, and B.Tech. from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in Mechanical Engineering. He is a recipient of the outstanding graduate research award and prestigious Lambert Fellowship at Purdue University and honorarium at the Soft Matter for All symposium at Princeton University. He works in the field of fluid mechanics focusing on complex fluids and soft matter with applications in energy storage technologies, advanced manufacturing, renewable energy, and environmental flows. His research combines scientific computing, numerical modeling, machine learning, and experimental tools to investigate the mechanics of soft materials across scales, from microscopic to macroscopic, to develop structure-property relationships and constitutive models.

Host: Professor Leonardo Chamorro

link for robots only