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Title: 3D Micro Particle Image Velocimetry

Projects:
Molecular Engineering of Microdevices (MEMD)
Institution:
Ohio State University Research Foundation
Primary Strategic Goal:
Discovery: Foster research that will advance the frontiers of knowledge, emphasizing areas of greatest opportunity and potential benefit and establishing the Nation as a global leader in fundamental transformational science and engineering.
Secondary Strategic Goal:
Learning: Build the Nation's research capability through critical investments in advanced instrumentation, facilities, cyber infrastructure, and experimental tools.

Achievement/Results

: IGERT trainee Orin Hemminger’s recent research activity has centered on using DNA as a model polymer to visualize molecular behavior during interesting flow phenomena. Non-Newtonian polymer solutions exhibit unique flow behaviors due to chain interactions. Direct visualization of these interactions will give insight to the microscopic behavior that leads to unexpected macroscopic flow and provide the foundation for the development of accurate simulations. Using fluorescently stained DNA to model polymer solutions enables direct visualization of the individual chains.

Address Goals

The high-speed confocal microscope has been used to obtain 3D velocity profiles for flows in microchannels, track bubble formation in microchannels to compare to Lattice-Boltzmann simulations, and generated the first visual evidence of chain conformations in entangled polymer flows.

Posted:
February 16, 2009