Seminar "Swimming water droplet in complex environment, confinement, gravity and collective effects" Charlotte de Blois

Micro/Bio/Nanofluidics (Shen) Unit would like to invite you to the seminar by Ms. Charlotte de Blois on Sep 26 (Thursday).
 
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Date: Thursday, Sep 26th, 2019
Time: 11:00-12:00
Venue: D015 (Level D, Lab 1)
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Speaker:

Ms. Charlotte de Blois
ESPCI Paris

Title:

Swimming water droplet in complex environment, confinement, gravity and collective effects

Abstract:

Abstract: One may simply be amazed in front of the diversity and complexity of life, yet, and maybe even more bewildering, living systems all share common hallmarks. In particular, the mobility plays a crucial role in the competitiveness between different species. Physics at microscales is different from the one we are used to at our macroscopic scale. This is why, micro-swimmers have developed specific strategies to induce motion. The understanding of such strategies is crucial at the fundamental level to apprehend the behavior of biological micro-swimmer, but also to achieve artificial locomotion in a surrounding fluid at the micron-scale, in order to perform a multitude of tasks in technical and medical applications (transport, mixing), which has become a central goal of nanoscience. In this context, biological and artificial micro-swimmers have been intensively studied, and we place our study in the framework of swimming in a realistic and complex environment, in the case where external factors (confinement, external force, other swimmers) may influence the swimming properties. In this work, using microfluidics, we create, put into complex situation and observe a model swimmer: a pure water swimming droplet in an outer oil-micelle solution.

S. Michelin et al, Spontaneous autophoretic motion of isotropic particles. Physics of Fluids, 25(6):61701, 2013.
Z. Izri et. al, Self propulsion of pure water droplets by spontaneous Marangoni-stress-driven motion. Physical Review Letters, 113(24):248302, 2014.
C. de Blois et al, Flow field around a confined active droplet. Physical Review Fluids, 2019.

Biography:

My three years at ESPCI Paris (2012-2015) gave me a strong interdisciplinary experimental background in physics, chemistry and biology. I chose to complete my education by doing a second Master at the university Pierre et Marie Curie of Sorbonne université: the Master ICFP (2015-2016) with an advanced theoretical background in soft matter, hydrodynamic and biophysics. I had three experimental internships during my Masters in the field of soft matter, and each of them has a strong link with image acquisition and analysis (in particular tomography and confocal microscopy). I am currently finishing my PhD on "swimming water droplets in microfluidic" (defense on November 5th). We answered fundamental questions such as the effect of confinement on a swimmer, which gave insight on the behavior of swimming microorganisms. I acquired several skills in microfluidics technology, active matter and flow visualization tools (Particle Image Velocimetry). These three years enforced my will to continue in academia, in the fields of soft matter and fluid dynamics.

Host:

Prof. Amy Shen