Category Archives: News & Updates

Article in New Scientist magazine !

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After presenting our work based on Maurice Mikker‘s Centrifuge Camera at the Annual meeting of the American Physics Society – Division of Fluid Dynamics in Washington, we had our work highlighted in the magazine New Scientist!

This is an on-going work with Maurice Mikkers and with my friend and collaborator at TU Delft’s Lorenzo Botto. Until a scientific paper comes out, you can take a look at Maurice’s Centrifuge Camera Channel.

Maurice had spent many years working as a lab technician 🧑‍🔬 and always wondered what the hell is going on inside those tubes every time he would put a sample to centrifuge. Now that he is a freelance photographer and daredevil artist, he can take crazy projects like this one. After borrowing some pieces from some of us, during the halt of the pandemic Maurice managed to put a small camera co-rotating with the centrifuge tubes.

When he first showed me the first video footages, I was not very impressed, everything happened as physics textbooks explain: denser stuff in your solution is pulled outwards due to the “fake gravity” created by the centrifugal force and lighter stuff than the liquid solvent would go in the opposite direction. That’s what you see in many of his videos. But there was one particular video that shocked me… [To Be Continued!]

Review paper on evaporating-driven flows!

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It took quite a while! but together with Hanneke Gelderblom (TU Eindhoven) and Christian Diddens (Univ. Twente and TU Eindhoven) we have finally published this complete review on evaporation-driven flows in sessile droplets (open access). It took long because we had to write about several tricky phenomena that are still unclear. In that regard, the contribution of Christian with his simulations has been crucial!. Although it is a review, we have developed some of the models further, added new simulations and computations to confirm some of the hypothesis and interpretations we propose, so there’s a lot to learn also for those experienced in the field.

Gallery of Fluid Motion Prize!

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Carola Seyfert has been working very hard on this beautiful phenomenon called “Marangoni Bursting” in the last months, and she realised that something “wrong” happened when she inserted certain type of polymer particles in the solution. She turned that “wrong” into something beautiful! and the committee of this year’s APS-DFD Gallery of Fluid Motion seem to have agreed. You can see the full 3 min video in our gallery of videos. Notice also the guitar score from the great Rodrigo Ezeta. Enjoy!

Collaboration in PoF on turbulent mayonnaise

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I collaborated recently with Dennis Bakhuis and Sander Huisman and others at Physics of Fluids in this cool project making mayonnaise by brute force and not relying and surfactants or stabilizers, only *very* vigorous steering. Of course the resulting emulsion is totally metastable and not tasty at all… 😅

Nevertheless, it was a titanic task for Dennis Bakhuis and Pim Bulle to measure the droplet size manually with a microscope immersed in this high turbulent flow to capture thousands of water-in-oil and oil-in-droplets and to realize that there’s an asymmetry that we fail to understand! So I’m looking forward for more.

Alvaro

clogging on tour

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I’m currently “on tour” presenting our work on the clogging of suspensions in Barcelona (last week), Stockholm (right now) and Twente next week (hardcoresoftmatter.com)… A preprint of the paper can be downloaded in arxiv already. Hopefully it will be officially published soon.
Please come by if you have the chance and never seen the presentation yet!

APS-DFD 2017

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Looking forward to be in Denver this year for the American Physics Society-Division of Fluid Dynamics, being held in Denver this year.
This year I’ll be talking about salty droplets and Tamy Guimarães ( @tamygb ) will be talking about some new stuff we have been doing on unclogging using acoustic forces.