Everything flows...

Outreach

Active Turbulence

In the intricate dance of life, minuscule phytoplankton cells exhibit a dynamic vitality, maneuvering through a realm of perpetual movement. Their capacity to swim, rotate, and influence their surroundings is essential for marine ecosystem health. At such tiny dimensions, the complexities of fluid mechanics pose challenges, with mixing and chaos prevailing. However, their individual movements, though seemingly random at the cellular level, collectively emerge in localized transport patterns guided by environmental stimuli. This phenomenon is termed "active turbulence" by scientists. Remarkably, these microscopic marvels not only sustain themselves but also impact global climate regulation. Understanding this emergence of collective motion remains an interesting challenge to fluid mechanists and biologists, in general

Active Liquid Crystals

Liquid crystals (LCs) forms a mesophase having characteristics between crystalline solids and liquids. LCs have diverse applications ranging from display devices, biomedical engineering and transition-control systems. Active LCs (ALCs) are certain LCs which exhibit spontaneous flow, phase transition and ordering properties. Active LCs have tremendous potential in engineering aspects ranging from smart display devices, targeted transport and intelligent biological cargo delivery.

Porous Zones and Chaos

Porous structures are ubiquitous to natural systems from underwater seabed to human brains. Such tortuous structure is a definite proponent for complex and chaotic flows. Designing porous systems for particular mode of chaos has remained a channel especially due to visualization of such flows and unpredictability of the flow evolution. 

Sustainable Instability

Instability and chaos are two key phenomena our nature displays at various length scales - from cloud formation to microscale mixing at natural water. Manifestation of chaos is itself a multiscale phenomena cascading its effect from micro to large scale systems. Understanding and harnessing chaos in controlled environment remains a channel. In addition, using biological systems to initiate such chaotic flows and exploiting its beneficial modes at multiscale transport and directed motion is a state-of-the-art research with enormous amount of scientific and engineering possibilities. 

Multi-body Interaction

Interacting bodies make up the fundamental of natural world. From amino acids and proteins, DNA strands to mesoscale collective dynamics, systems show intelligent nature through multi-body interactions. The dynamics in population can respond to external cues in a systematic and directed manner albeit the individual components does not possess any of the collective quality. Such emergent qualities have great fundamental as well as engineering consequence to design and study natural phenomena.