On August 22, Professor Detlef Lohse from Technical University of Twente, the Netherlands gave a lecture in the College of Engineering. The lecture was chaired by Professor Shiyi Chen, director of the State Key Laboratory for Turbulence and Complex Systems. 

Lohse has just received the G. K. Batchelor Prize in Fluid Mechanics on the 23rd International Congress of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (ICTAM2012), held on August 19-24 in China National Convention Center. The award is bestowed every four years by the International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics since 2008 to recognize distinguished researcher in the field of fluid mechanics.

Lohse talked about his team’s experimental research on droplet impact on (superheated) surfaces. They directly measure the time evolution of the air layer profile under the droplet using high-speed color interferometry, obtaining the air layer thickness before and during the wetting process. Based on the time evolution of the extracted profiles obtained at multiple times, they measure the velocity of air exiting from the gap between the liquid and the solid, and account for the wetting mechanism and bubble entrapment. They show that the dimensionless maximum spreading of impacting droplets on the heated surfaces in both gentle and spraying film boiling regimes shows a universal scaling with the Weber number, which is much steeper than for the impact on nonheated (hydrophilic or hydrophobic) surfaces.