ECHO grant: “from slippery to frictional colloids”
Success in the NWO-CW open competition on Excellent Chemical Research (ECHO)! A budget of 260 kEu for a PhD project was granted to Dr. Michel Duits (PI) and Prof. Stefan Luding from the Multi-Scale Mechanics group. The research will be aimed at understanding the effect of particle surface roughness on the dynamics of concentrated suspensions. Roughness causes friction, but for colloidal particles in liquid, the precise relation between the two is not well understood. For the entire fluid, friction has been connected to spectacular rheological phenomena. By performing (AFM, CSLM, rheology) experiments with a systematic variation of particle roughness, and comparing to numerical simulations for frictional and frictionless particles, we want to shed new light on the intriguing connection between particle roughness and suspension dynamics.
