B4: Control of flow patterns in complex fluids on the micron scale

Principal investigator:

Prof. Dr. Holger Stark [1]

Project summary:

Soft materials or complex fluids strongly respond to external fields and thereby show prominent non-equilibrium structure formation. The project explores different control strategies such as optimal and (time-delayed) feedback control to manipulate complex fluids, engineer their self-assembly, and induce novel motional flow patterns. In the first subproject we investigate inertial microfluidics which has high relevance for biomedical applications. In the second subproject we look at specific complex fluid models for viscoelasticity and phase separation. Our work is relevant for fluid mixing in microfluidics and for microrheology.