One process, many scales
From continuum films to individual particles
A coating flow is a continuum free-surface problem; a slurry is a crowd of interacting particles; a drying film is both at once. We choose the resolution that answers the question — FEM, LBM, or DEM.
Continuum · FEM
Free surfaces, beads, and coating windows
Galerkin finite-element models resolve what experiments can barely see inside the coating bead — menisci, contact lines, and recirculations.
- Vortex-free die design — feed-slot micro-vortices in high-speed slot coating are governed by die geometry — and shear-thinning slurry rheology itself helps stabilize the flow.
- Edge control — visco-capillary models explain why electrode edges rise or level, yielding design rules such as matching the coating gap to the wet thickness.
- Stability & frequency response — how coating windows shrink under periodic disturbances — the classical toolbox we keep extending to slurry rheology.
Mesoscale · phase field & LBM
Interfaces and pores, captured diffusely
Where interfaces merge, break, or thread through pores, we switch to diffuse-interface and lattice-Boltzmann descriptions.
- Robust phase-field methods — bounded property interpolation keeps viscoelastic–Newtonian multiphase computations clean, with no spurious stress leaking across interfaces.
- Bubbles in viscoelastic liquids — where elastic stress builds and relaxes along the interface decides whether a rising bubble stretches, splits, or stays spherical.
- Lattice Boltzmann for porous media — two-phase flow through dried, porous coated layers — where continuum film models stop applying.
Particles · DEM
Drying films, one particle at a time
In the last moments of drying, structure is decided particle by particle — a race between driving forces and vanishing mobility.
- Magnetic-field-directed assembly — evaporation thins the film while thickening the medium; a handful of dimensionless groups maps which particle structures survive.
- Kinetic arrest as a design tool — below a geometric film-thickness threshold, out-of-plane attraction shuts off and ordered monolayers emerge — structure selected by kinetics, not equilibrium.
- Simulation meets microscopy — many-particle simulations predict regime boundaries and arrested spacings that time-resolved optical microscopy confirms.