Zhi Liang
Missouri University of Science and Technology, MO·Engineering
Scientists understand well what happens when millimeter-sized or larger particles hit a liquid surface. They know much less about nanoparticles, which are billions of times smaller and collide at high speeds.
- Fields
Engineering
Physics
Materials Science
- Topics
nanoparticles
nanoparticle impact
liquid surfaces
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2029
What they work on
- Use molecular dynamics simulations to determine how liquid surface tension, viscosity, nanoparticle size, shape and impact speed each affect what happens when a nanoparticle strikes a liquid surface.
- Track the position, velocity and forces on a nanoparticle over time during impact, together with the changing liquid surface shape and contact line, details that current experiments cannot measure.
- Apply machine learning to classify nanoparticle-liquid impact behaviors and run sensitivity analyses that identify the key controlling parameters, using less data than full parameter sweeps.
- Identify the critical conditions for transitions between impact modes and detect where continuum-level predictions break down, producing design rules for applications.
More about the research
Nanoparticle impacts are too small and too fast to watch even with advanced instruments. Yet these collisions matter for cleaning pollutants from air, making advanced materials and designing sensors.
Why it matters
Nanoparticles hitting liquids are central to removing pollution from air, fabricating advanced materials and designing sensors. Clear rules for when nanoparticles bounce, stick or sink into a liquid, and for where standard fluid models fail, could help engineers design these industrial and biomedical processes. That could reduce the need for trial and error with experiments that cannot directly observe the collisions.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Xiaoyu Tang
Northeastern University, MA·Engineering·Early-career
Build an experimental platform that combines several advanced diagnostic methods to resolve flow, stress and particle concentration inside complex-fluid droplets as they hit surfaces, including opaque particle suspensions.
Jonathan Rothstein
University of Massachusetts, MA·Engineering
Measure how self-propelled Marangoni surfers move on levitating spherical water drops in microgravity aboard the International Space Station, focusing on how the drop's overall curvature changes their propulsion.
Yida Zhang
University of Colorado Boulder, CO·Engineering·Early-career
Examine whether self-organization governs how grains in granular soils collectively break under slow, quasi-static loading, and test whether simple universal rules describe crushing in soils with any grain-size mix.
The school
Missouri University of Science and Technology: 7 labs on PI Pages, $70M a year on research, 96 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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