Person

Lailai Zhu

This person is no longer with EPFL

Related publications (14)

Graph Chatbot

Chat with Graph Search

Ask any question about EPFL courses, lectures, exercises, research, news, etc. or try the example questions below.

DISCLAIMER: The Graph Chatbot is not programmed to provide explicit or categorical answers to your questions. Rather, it transforms your questions into API requests that are distributed across the various IT services officially administered by EPFL. Its purpose is solely to collect and recommend relevant references to content that you can explore to help you answer your questions.

The Hydrodynamics of a Micro-Rocket Propelled by a Deformable Bubble

François Gallaire, Lailai Zhu, Giacomo Gallino

We perform simulations to study the hydrodynamics of a conical-shaped swimming micro-robot that ejects catalytically produced bubbles from its inside. We underline the nontrivial dependency of the swimming velocity on the bubble deformability and on the ge ...

2019

, , , ,

We study here experimentally, numerically and using a lubrication approach, the shape, velocity and lubrication film thickness distribution of a droplet rising in a vertical Hele-Shaw cell. The droplet is surrounded by a stationary immiscible fluid and mov ...

CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS2019

Viscous Taylor droplets in axisymmetric and planar tubes: from Bretherton’s theory to empirical models

François Gallaire, Gioele Mariano Nicolò Balestra, Lailai Zhu

The aim of this study is to derive accurate models for quantities characterizing the dynamics of droplets of non-vanishing viscosity in capillaries. In particular, we propose models for the uniform-film thickness separating the droplet from the tube walls, ...

2018

Inertial manipulation of bubbles in rectangular microfluidic channels

Demetri Psaltis, François Gallaire, Gioele Mariano Nicolò Balestra, Miguel Antonio Modestino, Seyyed Mohammad Hosseini Hashemi, Lailai Zhu, Pooria Hadikhani

Inertial microfluidics is an active field of research that deals with crossflow positioning of the suspended entities in microflows. Until now, the majority of the studies have focused on the behavior of rigid particles in order to provide guidelines for m ...

2018

Swimming with a cage: low-Reynolds-number locomotion inside a droplet

François Gallaire, Lailai Zhu

Inspired by recent experiments using synthetic microswimmers to manipulate droplets, we investigate the low-Reynolds-number locomotion of a model swimmer (a spherical squirmer) encapsulated inside a droplet of a comparable size in another viscous fluid. Me ...

Royal Society of Chemistry2017

Bifurcation Dynamics of a Particle-Encapsulating Droplet in Shear Flow

François Gallaire, Lailai Zhu

To understand the behavior of composite fluid particles such as nucleated cells and double emulsions in flow, we study a finite-size particle encapsulated in a deforming droplet under shear flow as a model system. In addition to its concentric particle-dro ...

American Physical Society2017

The stability of a rising droplet: an inertialess non-modal growth mechanism

François Gallaire, Lailai Zhu, Giacomo Gallino

Prior modal stability analysis (Kojima et al., Phys. Fluids, vol. 27, 1984, pp. 19-32) predicted that a rising or sedimenting droplet in a viscous fluid is stable in the presence of surface tension no matter how small, in contrast to experimental and numer ...

Cambridge University Press2016

We adopt a boundary integral method to study the dynamics of a translating droplet confined in a Hele-Shaw cell in the Stokes regime. The droplet is driven by the motion of the ambient fluid with the same viscosity. We characterize the three-dimensional (3 ...

Cambridge University Press2016

A three-dimensional deformable capsule convected through a square duct with a corner is studied via numerical simulations. We develop an accelerated boundary integral implementation adapted to general geometries and boundary conditions. A global spectral m ...

Cambridge University Press2015

Motion of an elastic capsule in a constricted microchannel

Lailai Zhu, Cecilia Rorai

We study the motion of an elastic capsule through a microchannel characterized by a localized constriction. We consider a capsule with a stress-free spherical shape and impose its steady-state configuration in an infinitely long straight channel as the ini ...

2015