Chemical Engineering at the interface Lab

Focus of our research activity is the flow behavior of soft matter with a special emphasis on the role played by interfaces in a chemical engineering perspective. Interfaces are a common feature of soft matter due to the mesoscopic size of its constituents, such as emulsion droplets, surfactant vesicles and living cells, which belong to a range intermediate between the molecular and the macroscopic scales. This size range, coupled with the ensuing slow dynamics, makes soft matter single constituents observable by optical microscopy, thus providing a powerful tool for the direct visualization of microscale phenomena. Our research approach is based on exploiting advanced optical microscopy techniques, such as confocal, epifluorescence, polarized, time-lapse and high-speed imaging, to visualize the behavior of soft matter in different environments and process conditions, including flow cells, diffusion chambers, biological plates, membrane devices and metal surfaces. Optical microscopy combined with image analysis techniques is especially valuable in our efforts to study the rheological and interfacial phenomena affecting the microstructure of soft matter at the level of its single constituents under well-defined flow conditions. The latter include simple shear flow in a sliding parallel plate apparatus and Poiseuille flow in channels of different cross sections. Furthermore, we use microfluidics and lab-on-chip technologies to investigate complex fluids flowing in a network of microchannels. Apart from the advantages of small sample volumes and fast transport processes, our interest in these technologies is motivated by their capability of reproducing the flow geometry of blood microcirculation, which is an example of ante litteram microfluidic systems in vivo.