Capillary flow through thin porous media; an interferometric approach

CENCHA, LUISA G.

Hamburgo

Seminario; Seminar "Patrick Huber's research group"; 2019

Universidad de Tecnología de Hamburgo

This talk focuses on the capillary flow of simple and complex fluids through nanoporous media, which is currently of great interest in fundamental studies and applied science.   During my PhD, the interplay between optical, fluid dynamics and soft matter fundamentals helped me to develop a method to extract information of infiltrated polymers into nanoporous matrices. The analysis of the filling dynamics allows the study of certain polymer parameters in its confined state, as is the effective viscosity. The proposed technique also allows the study of polymers in confinement as a function of temperature, expanding its applicability to a huge range of polymer viscosities. This characteristic implies an important advantage regarding the current methods reported in the literature for the study of capillary flow in nano-confinement.  The features and fundamentals of the method, together with some effective viscosity results of two different polymers will be presented.