ERC Consolidator Grant for research on faster fluid mixing
Outi Tammisola, Professor of Fluid Mechanics at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, receives an ERC Consolidator Grant of €2 million for a five-year period for the project “INTER-ET”.
“We hope to enable better mixing in small-scale flow. We want to achieve faster mixing of components and chemical reactions, for example in microfluidics for drug manufacturing,” she says.
How would you describe the aim of the project “Interaction of Elasto-inertial Turbulence and material microstructure - INTER-ET”?
“Turbulence in general helps mixing of fluids, chemical reactions and heat transfer. The aim of the project is to improve the understanding of so-called ‘elasto-inertial turbulence’, which occurs in complex fluids at very low flow rates and small length scales. The length scales may have been reduced to below millimeters.”
“In ordinary fluids, it is very difficult to get different particles or chemicals to mix in small-scale flow, because the mixing flow in water, for example, is extremely slow,” Tammisola says.
“Adding as little as hundreds of parts per thousand of polymers to the water allows effective mixing by elastic turbulence. On the other hand, you don't want elastic turbulence in sensitive applications, such as cell sorting in blood purification, so it's important to know exactly when and how the phenomenon occurs.”
How can society benefit from the results in the future?
“Elastic turbulence has recently received a lot of attention as a promising way to increase mixing and heat transfer at small scales, for example in lab-on-a-chip applications.”
“Other potential applications are in biomedicine, soil remediation and the design of new biomaterials. In addition, we want to better understand biological processes, as blood, saliva and mucus are complex fluids with similar properties.”
How is the research performed?
“We combine advanced high-performance computing with lab experiments using novel methods. This means that we measure the microstructure of the material simultaneously with the flow, to find out how the polymers interact with the flow and when elastic turbulence occurs.”
Outi Tammisola already has an ERC-Starting Grant, which runs until August 2025.
Read more about the research project here: www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-fluid-mechanics/article/effect-of-finite-weissenberg-number-on-turbulent-channel-flows-of-an-elastoviscoplastic-fluid/4512F46D1835F99731C57B11BA8AB756
Text: Katarina Ahlfort
Photo: KTH Royal Institute of Technology