ESPCI web site
ESPCI is launching a new online course on the dynamics of fluid interfaces, based on the expertise of the teachers/researchers working at the school. Conceived by Marc Fermigier, David Quéré, researchers/techers at the Laboratoire de Physique et Mécanique des Milieux Hétérogènes and Christophe Clanet, teacher/researcher at Ecole Polytechnique, the course addresses students with good knowledge of elementary physics, but also anyone willing to deepen its knowledge on the field.
The course is divided in 6 parts, each one divided in several chapters, with many movies of experiments, references and exercises of varying difficulty.
Registration will open online on January 2nd 2019 on the site France Université Numérique, and the course will begin in March2019. Registration is free of charge, without any limitation.
The intiative is supported by:
PSL University
The Fonds ESPCI Paris
The Jean Langlois Foundation
France Université Numérique
About this course
Interfaces such as between water and air or water and oil hold a special kind of energy called surface energy or surface tension. At small length scale, typically below 1 cm the surface energy, possibly with gravitational energy, kinetic energy or viscous dissipation dictates the shape and evolution of interfaces.The purpose of this course is to provide a basic understanding of interfacial phenomena going from the shape of rain drops, the fragmentation of a jets, the water repellent properties of leaves to the bursting of soap bubbles.
The concepts and physical quantities are always introduced from an experimental observation. In the derivations, we favor scaling laws instead of detailed mathematical calculations in order to extract the essence of the underlying physics.
The laws of capillarity were established at the beginning of the nineteenth century. However research in this field is very active because of its position at the frontier between applied and fundamental science. For instance, the development of microfluidic devices has raised a number of questions related to the dynamics of fluid interfaces. The design of smart interfaces with original wetting properties has enabled the manipulation of drops on solids. The development of new tools both at micro-scale (atomic force microscopy) and macro-scale (digital high speed imaging) has revolutionized experiments.
In every part, we have included illustrative videos from recent publications, either kindly provided by colleagues throughout the world or from our own research. For those who want to go beyond this course, references to research contributions in scientific journals are given.
Teaching team}
Christophe Clanet
Christophe Clanet is CNRS research director at Laboratoire d’Hydrodynamique de l’Ecole Polytechnique (LadhyX) and professor at Ecole Polytechnique. He was professor at ESPCI from 2009 to 2018.
Marc Fermigier
Marc Fermigier is professor at laboratoire de Physique et Mécanique des Milieux Hétérogènes, ESPCI Paris.
David Quéré
David Quéré is CNRS research director at laboratoire de Physique et Mécanique des Milieux Hétérogènes, ESPCI-Paris. He is professor at Ecole Polytechnique and distinguished professor at ESPCI Paris.
Lucie Domino and Martin Coux
Lucie Domino and Martin Coux are Paris Sciences et Lettres PhD students at laboratoire de Physique et Mécanique des Milieux Hétérogènes at ESPCI. They contributed to the experiments illustrating this course.