TIPs Department, Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
Tentative title:
Surface Tension based Micromanipulation
Abstract:
Surface tension is one of the dominant effects in microsystems. It can be used as capillary forces to pick and place components, or as force field at the interface between two fluids. The current challenges related to surface tension in microsystems are manyfold: overcome wettability variability, liquid dispensing at the nL scale, fast dynamics, control of surface tension effects through a variety of stimuli (surfactants, temparature, electric fields, pressure...)
Biography:
Pierre LAMBERT received his PhD degree in engineering sciences from the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium in 2004. and his habilitation from the Université Bourgogne Fracnhe-Comté in 2010. He is currently Professor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, in the field of microengineering and microfluidics. He was the coordinator of the Belgian thematic network on Microfluidics and Micromanipulation: Multiscale Applications of Surface Tension (www.micromast2016.ulb.be). His current research interests are in the fields of soft robotics (tunable stiffness mechanisms, smart catheters, soft actuators) and of surface tension effects in microsystems (capillary gripping, capillary self-alignment, thermocapillary micromanipulation).