The recent upsurge for investigating liquid flows at smaller and smaller scales, has appeared around a decade ago. Historically, it is partly explained owing the progresses of technologies in micro-fabrication, surface treatments and in electrical or magnetical active materials allowing the fabrication of accurate actuators. At the same time, the technologies of visualisation greatly improved as well: high-speed or high-resolution cameras, better and better microscopes, ... This has let a huge space of investigation for teams like FILMS, to try and understand the physical mechanisms that rule flows at small scales, where analytical approaches can sometimes be carried out - due to the absence of inertial terms in the momentum equations. On the other side, unexpected effects like the influence of confinement, the slip near walls or the huge viscous stress, make the situations sometimes more complex than in large-scale flows. In short, microfluidics opened a new type of problems requiring specific experimental and theoretical methods.

Amongst the national and international context, the general scopes of the research in the FILMS team are to investigate:

1. • The influence of micro-actuators (acoustical, magnetical, ...) on fluid flows.
   

2. • Out-of-equilibrium phenomenons, i.e. unstable or chaotic flows with natural applications in transfer and mixing.
   

3. • Problems coupling phenomenons at liquid interfaces and flows of complex fluids.
   

FILMS team has currently several national and international collaborations with :

1. •Institut de Recherche Interdisciplinaire (IRI), University of Lille, France.
   

2. •McGill University, Canada.
   

3. •PMMH-ESPCI, France.
   

4. •University of Liège, Belgium.
   

5. •University of Bristol, UK.
   

6. •University of Twente, Netherlands.
   

7. •University of Zaragoza, Spain.
   

8. •LadhyX, Ecole Polytechnique - France.
   

9. •ONERA, France.
   

10. •PMMH - ESPCI, Paris, France.
    

11. •University of Warwick, UK.
    

12. •University of Florida, USA
    

13. •University of Bordeaux 1, France.
    

14. •Japanese Space Agency JAXA, Japan
    

15. •Tokyo University of Science (TUS), Japan

Welcome to FILMS team web page.

Our laboratory is located in the Institut d'Electronique, Microélectronique et Nanotechologies (IEMN) and is part of the AIMAN group and the Laboratoire Européen en magnétoacoustique nonlinéaire (LEMAC).

Contact us

Institut d'Electronique de Microélectronique et de Nanotechnologie (IEMN) CNRS 8520

équipe: Fluides, Interfaces Liquides et Micro-Systèmes (FILMS)

Avenue Poincaré - BP 60069 - 59652 Villeneuve d'Ascq cedex 

Tél : +33 (0)3 20 19 79 79, Fax : +33(0)3 20 19 78 80