Guest lecture on “Droplet Microfluidics”

The Department of Chemical Engineering, MVJCE, organised a Guest Lecture on ‘Droplet Microfluidics’ by Dr. Danny Raj M, INSPIRE Faculty, Department of Chemical Engineering, IISc, Bangalore.

The session was conducted at Rajalaksmi Seminar Hall, from 8.00am to 9.30am, on 21.09.2019.

Participants

The Guest Lecture was attended by 130 students of 3^rd, 5^th and 7^th Semesters, along with 8 faculty members, from the Department of Chemical Engineering.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Danny Raj M is an Inspire faculty form department of Chemical Engineering IISc, Bangalore working since July 2017. He has completed his PhD in 2017 from Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai and his thesis work deals with the concept of droplet microfluidics. After obtaining his PhD, he continued as a post-doctoral fellow in IIT Madras and carried out various collaborative projects, naming a few are experimental investigation of a spinning disk atomizer to synthesize mono-disperse particles, modelling the working of an Aluminium smelting operation (in collaboration with GE), sensor design for droplet detection, and development of machine learning approaches for droplet microfluidics.

Meanwhile, he was also a visiting scholar in University of West Virginia, Morgantown, USA from Sept 2014 to Jan 2015. As a key note speaker He has delivered the guest talks held in the Department of chemical engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville in 2015 and IIT Madras in 2017. Dr. Danny Raj M has published 6 research articles in high esteemed journals.

The Contents of the Lecture, in brief

The Lecture was very educative and informative to students as well as faculty. The lecture was about Droplet microfluidics, the field of study which consists of producing and manipulating droplets inside very small channels for different applications that range from particle synthesis to DNA sequencing to soft computing. Fabrication of micro-channel and observation the motion of droplets in the channel typically solves the forward problem which involves understanding the behavior of droplets for a given geometry and operating condition. Design problem involves identifying the geometry and operating strategy required to yield the desired behavior of droplets in a microchannel and the non-linear nature of droplet flow which results in collective droplet motion renders design non-intuitive. The talk educated students also about ‘Self organisation of drops’, which tells about ordered arrangements inside 2D microchannels and inverse problems in complex droplet system, Coalescence avalanches, which tells about isolated coalescence event, in a concentrated emulsion flowing through a 2D microchannel, can trigger an avalanche of similar events which results in spontaneous destabilization of the droplet assembly and finding the solution using Matlab and other modeling methods

Outcome:

This Guest Lecture helped to stimulate thought processes, arousing interest and motivating further inquiry and discussion among students. Also, the lecture enabled the students to learn few basics about the Droplet Microfulidics, the field of study which consists of producing and manipulating droplets inside very small channels for different applications, which enlightened students for new research ideas with the basics of chemical engineering subjects like mass transfer, chemical computational modelling and chemical reaction engineering, also applications in day-to-day life.

Ms. Saraswati Kulkarni
Asst. Professor
Staff Coordinator