Soft granular matter refers to materials composed of close-packed deformable microscopic ‘grains’ (typically non-Brownian, i.e., of sizes of tens or hundreds of microns), examples including dense emulsions, foams, or microhydrogel suspensions. Whereas bulk rheological properties (flow, elasticity, plasticity) of such materials have been thoroughly investigated, the fascinating perspective of their manipulation at mesoscale, i.e., at the scale of single ‘grains’, e.g., for the purpose of assembling compartmentalized half-solid half-liquid meso-architectures (clusters, chains, arrays, etc.), have not been explored. In the group, we develop new microfluidic strategies of formulation of such structures while also exploring their application as cell scaffolds for tissue engineering.
Relevant Publications:
- Guzowski, J.; Garstecki, P., Droplet Clusters: Exploring the Phase Space of Soft Mesoscale Atoms. Physical Review Letters 2015, 114 (18), 188302.