Dr. Ling received the NSF CAREER award with an amount of $505,075. The project title is: “CAREER: Diffusive and Convective Gas Dissolution over Super-Hydrophobic Surfaces”. In this project, Dr. Ling aims to understand the gas dissolution process over Super-Hydrophobic Surfaces through innovative experiments and develop new strategies to extend the longevity of gas. This project has an education plan including five activities: undergraduate student-lead original research, summer workshop for high-school students, table-top experiments for K-12 students, class trip to a local autonomous underwater vehicle manufacturer, and technology showcase to marine industry in the Southeastern New England area.

The paper was entitled “Impact of the Undersaturation Level on the Longevity of Superhydrophobic Surfaces in Stationary Liquids”. This work was supported by NSF and ONR, and UMassD Seed Funding program.

 

 

Ankit Gupta is a new graduate student, and Colin J Nicoll is a new undergraduate student. Welcome.

Restoring and maintaining the gas layer (plastron) on underwater superhydrophobic surface (SHS) is critical for the real-world application of SHS, such as reducing friction drag in high-Reynolds number turbulent flows. In this work, we experimentally investigated the capability of a technology based on porous material and gas injection to restore the plastron on an underwater SHS from a fully wetted state.

We tracked 3D motion of bacteria and found how they accumulated to the wall. Check out more information here.

Md Elius worked in Ling’s lab from Sep 2021 to Aug 2023. His Master thesis work was to understand the bacterial and super-hydrophobic surface interaction. He will join UC Berkeley as a graduate student. Congratulations!

A new paper entitled “Fabrication and characterization of super-hydrophobic surfaces based on sandpapers and nano-particle coatings” was published in Colloids and Surfaces A: Physicochemical and Engineering Aspects. This work was supported by NSF, ONR, and UMassD seed fund. Full article is available here.

 

 

Christina Hart and her team members Ethan Osley, Damian Guilbe Boscana, and Shawn Marcoux took home the first-place $500 prize for their design to build an underwater holographic imaging system for marine microplastics detection. This is a capstone project, sponsored our group. Check out more details of this news here.

We have a new paper accepted for publication at Physical Biology, entitled: “Velocity correlations in jackdaw flocks in different ecological contexts”. This work is a collaboration with Prof. Ouellette from Stanford University and Prof. Thornton from University of Exeter. The plot below show the spatial distributions of velocity and velocity fluctuation in one of the jackdaw flocks.