The PhD defence will be in Abels utsikt - Niels Henrik Abels hus. The host of the session will moderate the technicalities while the chair of the defence will moderate the disputation.
Ex auditorio questions: the chair of the defence will invite the audience to ask questions ex auditorio at the end of the defence.
Trial lecture
March 25th, time: 10:15 am, room 1259 (Abels utsikt).
The Fluid Mechanics of Carbon Dioxide Sequestering
Main research findings
Understanding wetting on soft materials, such as droplets on solid gels and rubbers, is crucial for designing advanced materials in applications like wound healing, flexible electronics, and 3D printing. This thesis explores how the geometry of the soft solid substrate and its poro-viscoelastic properties influence wetting behavior.
We first examine droplet wetting on (1) a plate, (2) two parallel plates forming a capillary bridge, and (3) a cylindrical fiber. Each solid substrate is coated with a soft elastic layer. We demonstrate that varying substrate softness alters the contact angle of the droplet, offering insights into controlling droplet motion by modifying the coating layer. For wetting on a fiber, our findings show that elastic deformation increases as the rigid core's radius decreases. Significant disparities in deformation between the solid-liquid and solid-gas interfaces appear.
In polymeric gel substrates, solvent can diffuse across the interface, causing swelling. We investigate the growth of the wetting ridge in polymer gels using a large-deformation theory. Our study reveals how two key dissipation mechanisms—viscoelasticity and poroelasticity—govern wetting ridge growth and liquid transport within the soft material.
Adjudication committee
- Lecturer Robert Style, ETH Zürich
- Senior Lecturer Draga Pihler-Puzovic, University of Manchester
- Professor Mikael Mortensen, University of Oslo
Supervisors
- Researcher Tak Shing Chan, University of Oslo
- Professor Andreas Carlson, University of Oslo
- Dr. Christian Pedersen, University of Oslo
Chair of defence
Head of Department Erlend Fornæss Wold.
Host of the session
Professor Mikael Mortensen, University of Oslo