Project description
Material testing inspired by animal sounds
Complex fluids, a family of multiphase fluids, are ubiquitous across a wide array of industrial products including cement, food, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals. Characterising their strength and elasticity when subject to an applied force is often not simple as their properties can vary widely. Cataloguing the whole range of material properties is time consuming. EU funding of the OrthoChirp project will enable researchers to improve characterisation of soft material properties. The focus will be on combining the optimally windowed chirp, a technique inspired by the sound sequences of certain animals with superposition flows in rheology. These techniques will be used to test the properties of gelling polymers, proteins, colloidal gels or any other ‘mutating’ soft materials.
Objective
"The purpose of this project is to demonstrate a proof-of-concept for a novel and universal method to mechano-spectroscopically investigate transient evolution of a complex-fluid's microstructure when subjected to a non-linear deformation or flow. Dr Victor Boudara will pursue this goal at the Department of Chemical Engineering of KU Leuven, under the supervision of Prof Christian Clasen. The goals of the project will be achieved by combining an optimized excitation signal structure (as recently introduced with the novel ""Optimally Windowed Chirp"" technique) with the concept of orthogonal superposition rheometry. The possibility to superpose such a rapid mechano-spectroscopy onto deforming system would allow, for the first time, to characterise the material property evolution of rapidly mutating materials over a wide range of frequencies under nonlinear shear flow. Such materials include gelling polymers, proteins, colloidal gels or jamming glasses, which are not only of fundamental but also of industrial and biomedical interest."
Fields of science
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
3000 Leuven
Belgium