Flow of complex fluids
Panta rhei – everything flows. The research on complex fluids in PCC spans a wide range of topics but with one central theme in common: flowing matter. We combine experimental, theoretical, and numerical methods to solve both curiosity-driven and industrially-motivated problems pertaining to fluid dynamics in soft matter systems. The topics include flows in biological and bio-inspired systems (swimming of microorganisms, biomolecular condensates) as well as in synthetic systems (emulsions, polymer networks, coacervates). The complexity arises from the nature of the fluid (multiphase, non-Newtonian) and/or the nature of the flow, and we use several techniques to address these scenarios such as high-speed imaging, laser speckle imaging, (confocal) microscopy, optical tweezers, rheometry, and high-fidelity simulations.
