School of Mechanical Engineering Yoav Green
School of Mechanical Engineering Seminar
Monday, March 12, 2018 at 14:00
Wolfson Building of Mechanical Engineering, Room 206
The Fluid Dynamics of Nanochannels and Biological Systems
Yoav Green
Post doc guest of Touvia Miloh
Nanochannels and nanopores are ubiquitous to nature and technology. They can be found in macroscopically large permselective membranes such as those used for desalination in electrodialysis systems, or small system such as cell membranes. The sub-micron scale in such systems allows them not only to desalinate water, harvest energy, and serve as highly sensitive bio-molecular detectors, but it also allows these nanochannels to behave as diode-like current rectifiers.
In nanofluidics systems, a nanochannel is typically connected to much larger microchannels/reservoirs. Until recently, in the nanofluidics community it was assumed that the effects of the microchannels is negligible. In this talk, I will present contradicting evidence to this assumption. I will then present a new modified paradigm which emphasizes the importance of the microchannels themselves as well as the microchannel-nanochannel interfaces. These new insights are extremely useful for designing new nanofluidic based systems.
To conclude, I will present my recent research in biomechanics that focuses on relating the kinematics of an epithelial monolayer of cells to its kinetics. As the epithelial monolayer migrates collectively, each constituent cell exerts intercellular stresses on neighboring cells and exerts traction forces on its substrate. The relationship between the velocities, stresses and tractions is fundamental to collective cell migration but it remains unknown. It will be shown that the observed dynamics does not conform to the simple and commonly assumed laws of a linear Hookean solid or Newtonian fluid. Rather the mechanics are much more complicated and likely because of the active nature of the cells. These findings are crucial for developing a deeper understanding of collective cellular behavior.
Yoav Green is currently a post-doctoral researcher in the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health where he is working in the field of biomechanics. Before that Yoav received his PhD in mechanical engineering from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology where his research fields were nanofluidics and electrokinetics. Yoav also holds a MSc in physics (astrophysics and astronomy) from the Weizmann Institute of Science, and BSc in aerospace engineering from the Technion.
