Zehao Pan
Researcher in flow and materials
Welcome to my webpage!
Introduction
I am a researcher in complex fluids, that is the study of substances like paint, batter, oil when they are flowing, spraying or changing their physical properties. It is not only fun to understand their counterintuitive behaviors but also important to understand how to control them to make them more useful. As you will see below, one of my favorite projects is the generation of uniform water droplets in oil using a technique called electrospray - an unexpected result when the water is dissolved with polymers and the electric field alternates very fast. Another interesting project is when entangled particles are pushed through a narrowing channel - they will automatically increase their concentration through a mechanism call poroelasticity.
Feel free to contact me through email: zehaop@princeton.edu.
To reduce the complexity of conventional two phase flow system, a new droplet generation method is developed that only requires flow control of the dispersed phase. We call the method immersed alternating current electrospray (iACE), which can generate aqueous droplets with diameters ranging from 5 μm to 150μm in a stationary oil phase.
When a suspension of spherical or near-spherical particles passes through a constriction the volume fraction either remains the same or decreases due to clogging. In contrast to these particle suspensions, here we observe that an entangled fiber suspension can increase its volume fraction up to 14-fold after passing through a constriction.