Seminar on Instabilities in Thin Aqueous Clay Suspension Layers by Prof Ranjini Bandyopadhyay | Department of Physics



In this seminar, Prof Ranjini Bandyopadhyay will present recent experiments focusing on the growth of interfacial instabilities in viscoelastic suspensions of colloidal clay. The study explores the displacement of these suspensions by wetting and non-wetting Newtonian fluids in a confined geometry. Additionally, Prof Bandyopadhyay will discuss another intriguing set of experiments concerning the formation of cracks in drying layers of aqueous clay suspensions. She will demonstrate that the scaling relation between the time of crack onset and sample elasticity can be elucidated by integrating Griffith's fracture criterion into a poroelastic model. This research sheds light on methods to suppress or minimize these instabilities, which are typically undesirable in practical applications.