HP-NTU Digital Manufacturing Corporate Lab is pleased to have Dr Katrina Donovan, Lecturer in Materials and Metallurgical Engineering at South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, to share with us for our next TechTalk. She will be sharing about the microfluidic investigations of capillary flow and surface phenomena in porous polymeric in 3D Printing.

Date: 27 October, Tuesday (10:00am - 11:00am)

Venue: Virtual Talk - Zoom link will be shared with registered participants

Register here

About the speaker:
Katrina J. Donovan, Ph.D. is a Lecturer in Materials and Metallurgical Engineering at South Dakota School of Mines & Technology (SG Mines) in Rapid City, SD. During her graduate studies at Oregon State University, she worked at HP Inc. in the 3D Printing sector. Upon completion of her doctoral degree, she moved to South Dakota, co-founded a consulting company Dragon Materials, LLC, and later accepted a faculty position at SD Mines.

Katrina is a Materials Scientist specializing in experimental design and technique development for soft materials, complex fluids, and surface phenomena. She have a wide range of experience in rheological, thermal, structural, and molecular characterization that she leverages fundamentally for academic purposes as well as industrially for applications. Designing experiments and creating novel techniques to answer fundamental questions that drive applications and technology forward captivates her interest.

Synopsis:
The advent of 3D Printing has invigorated research into metamaterials, synthetic composite material that produce properties generally not found in natural materials, requiring further studies into understanding the fundamental properties of these materials. This presentation proposes a novel imaging technique to investigate the surface interactions occurring in an unsaturated packed porous polymeric powder bed experiencing a colloidal fluid penetrating the powder bed, specifically to characterize nanoparticle attachment to polymeric particles.

Additionally, Washburn capillary rise studies provide quantitative information about the free energy of a surface, specifically, contact angle. Temperature dependent studies were performed to probe the impact of fluids and polymeric powders interactions in elevated temperatures. An unintentional advantage of this novel imaging technique is that the experiment is straightforward, cheap, and time efficient; aptly described as “frugal science”.