Project description
Achieving precision in spray technology
Spray technology is essential in industries like agriculture, cleaning and medicine, but current methods often struggle to control the size of droplets effectively. This lack of precision can lead to inefficiencies, as incorrect droplet sizes may fail to reach intended targets, limiting the effectiveness of sprays in tasks such as crop protection and drug delivery. Traditional trial-and-error approaches to spray development are reaching their limits, unable to meet the demand for better performance. A new approach is urgently needed to achieve perfectly controlled, monodisperse sprays. With this in mind, the ERC-funded RayleighSprays project tackles this challenge by exploring the underlying physics of liquid break-up. Combining advances in hydrodynamics and nanofabrication, the project aims to create spray nozzles capable of producing highly controlled droplet sizes, with promising applications in precision agriculture and medicine.
Objective
Sprays have a wide range of applications, from cleaning to agriculture to medical treatments. Spray technologies are key to many industrial processes, yet many current spray technologies suffer from insufficient control over the resulting spray parameters, such as the droplet size distribution, even though the drop size critically determines whether a spray reaches its target or not in applications such as pharmaceutical drug inhalation and agricultural spraying. As trial-and-error spray development methods are reaching their limits, we need a new breakthrough to enable perfectly monodisperse sprays.
I have previously shown that insights into the physics of sprays can lead to improved spraying and deposition methods. For agricultural sprays I achieved the first detailed understanding of the strongly non-equilibrium processes that underlie spray formation, allowing for a quantitative description of the drop size distribution in these sprays. These insights pave the way to improving our understanding of sprays in general and translating it into a new generation of spray nozzles that produce highly controlled droplet size distributions as urgently needed by a range of applications. The scientific challenge is to identify the complex nonequilibrium physics underlying liquid breakup and use these insights to devise entirely novel ways of controlling instabilities to achieve perfectly monodisperse sprays.
We will combine breakthroughs in hydrodynamics to ‘tame’ the instabilities responsible for spray formation, using selective excitation of instability modes combined with novel nanofabrication methods for spray nozzles. In addition, we will study drop coalescence and droplet trajectories in air. We will elucidate spray mechanisms allowing for monodisperse sprays, and explore the role of liquid composition in complex sprays. These fundamental breakthroughs will be tested in precision medicine and agriculture, two of the most important fields of spray use.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- medical and health sciences basic medicine pharmacology and pharmacy drug discovery
- agricultural sciences agriculture, forestry, and fisheries agriculture
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2023-ADG
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1012WX Amsterdam
Netherlands
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