Materials Colloquium 2022, November 2nd

In-person in HCI G3:


Foams and emulsions: Deforming bubbles and coalescing droplets with microscale flows

Cari Dutcher (University of Minnesota)

Soft interface-rich multiphase systems such as foams, emulsions, and aerosols are all around us. To characterize the multiphase system dynamics and stability, often information about the thermodynamic and material properties of the interfaces is needed.  Microscale platforms can be used to enable measurements of these soft interfaces at length and timescales of interest to the multiphase applications.  These advanced platforms can generate, detect, manipulate, and sort microscale droplets and bubbles in an enclosed environment without large and expensive control systems. In this talk, I highlight our group’s approach to measuring dynamic surface and interfacial tension, thin film stability, and droplet phase using microfluidic contractions, traps, and wells.


Understanding disordered crystals: A lesson from machine learning

Arkadiy Simonov (Multifunctional Ferroic Materials — D-MATL)

In contrast to ordered crystals, in which atomic structure can be straightforwardly measured using Bragg x-ray scattering, disordered crystals pose a significant problem. Their atomic structure can be probed using diffuse scattering, however data analysis for such signal is currently very limited, time consuming and requires multiple trials and errors. In this talk I will show how to directly solve the structure of disordered material using a flavor of machine learning technique based on the so-called Density Consistency approach.