Four new projects related to various aspects of electrokinetic tracking will start today. Lorenzo Peres is going to make a microfluidic channel with embedded electrodes. This channel hopefully allows him to measure surface charge of the channel as function of flow. Peter Speets will also use a similar channel to study growth and shrinkage of protein aggregates using nanoparticle tracking and resonant light scattering. Milo Colaris will use an acoustic levitator to measure the viscosity of a floating droplet of a suspension as it dries. The method he develps will be later applied to very small droplets trapped with an optical tweezers.

In a collaboration with Amir Raoof from the faculty of Geosciences, Qianjing Tang with make a new optical setup for studying flow in planar microchannels using a technique similar to Fluorecence Recovery after Photobleaching. In this setup, we should be able to study flow in centimeter-wide networks with micrometer resolution.