Dr. Sunny Jung's pictures of bioinspired design featured in the Physics of Fluids Gallery of Fluid Motion

A recent edition of Physics of Fluids contains images of floating flowers and spider webs taken by Dr. Sunny Jung, assistant professor of engineering science and mechanics. These images show the utility of bioinspired design.

Taking inspiration from floating flowers, Dr. Jung designed a pipette that is able to isolate very small fluid volumes. It can be readily implemented, for instance, in microfluidic devices. Dr. Jung cut the fabric for artificial flowers out of a flexible polymer sheet. Such a flower deformed when submerged in water, but could also in some cases completely close, thus staying dry inside by trapping an enclosed air bubble. When he inverted the experiment, withdrawing the artificial flower from the water, Dr. Jung found that it was able to trap a water droplet and so serve as an elastocapillary pipette.

Details of this interesting work can be found in the paper, Capillary origami in nature, Physics of Fluids 21, 091110, 2009.

[Email to friend]

Complete list of news articles