This group develops leading functional and structural materials and fabrication strategies, including the assembly of complex nano and micro-constructed soft material systems and their nanocomposites.
Super-slurp and Super-slippery Surfaces
Wetting and dewetting are fundamental ways that liquids move on solid surfaces. They are vital for processes such as drying, coating and lubrication. Research into the has helped improved the flow of liquid in pipes and textured surfaces. The development of slippery liquid infused porous surfaces is being used to develop medical diagnostic applications in partnership with QuantumDx as a way of improving liquid transport for diagnostic devices.
Manipulating Droplets or Liquid Films
This group developed the “” – a sublimation heat engine which can convert temperature differences into mechanical work via the Leidenfrost effect. This offers new ways of controlling and creating leidenfrost turbine surfaces. This research focuses on exploiting extreme environmental conditions found in, for example, deep drilling and outer space, to harness vaporisation of liquids and ice at high temperature differences. Achieving droplet control during evaporation has application in a broad range of fields such as printing, heat transfer and cleaning.
Production of Responsive and Multi-phase Engineering Materials
This group is researching the use of microfluidic channels to develop microgel systems and surface acoustic waves to develop bio and wearable sensors. This is being developed through two industry partnerships, one for the diagnosis of infectious disease and the other for monitoring patient drug levels.
Key projects
This project used electric-field induced film formation to study non-naturally occurring droplet shapes on film. The ability to finely control liquid droplets on film has industrial applications such as printing and displays.
Many of our day-to-day activities rely on liquids being transported through tubes or pipes. Resistance to flow has a high industrual cost and improving flow rate would increase efficiency and allow new applications in a range of industries. This work analysed two ways of experimentally implementing flow in channels and tubes to improve understanding, and allow future development of materials that reduce frictional resistance to the flow of liquids.
This project created surfaces which give low contact angle hysteresis, low friction and with the capability of imparting motion onto droplet without the need for a pumping mechanisms. This ability to control the liquid droplet interactions with surfaces has a range of potential practical applications such as is medical and domestic appliances.
This project explored the impact of non-Newtonian liquid rheology on the physics of slippery liquid-infused porous surfaces. Understanding these processes better will help inform the design of new smart materials and the use of these materials for food packaging and biomedical devices.
Based on previous proof-of-concept work on the Leidenfrost Engine (see above) this work explored the concept of a Leidenfrost Engine based on substrates with turbine shaped surface patterns.
This work examined whether the processes of buckling, wrinkling and creases of surfaces can be harnessed and developed to dynamically regulated the liquid flow in a micro-channel.
This project explored the concept of ‘hygrotaxis’ - a new self-propulsion mechanism for liquids that exploits non-uniform ambient humidities to create fluid flow.
This project is examining new platform technology to manufacture flexible devices for non-invasive and rapid medical diagnostics.
This project’s aim is to develop a wearable sensing platform by integrating two emerging technologies – metamaterial sensors and piezoelectric polymers.
