Why suspensions
Everything we coat begins as a suspension
Battery electrodes, fuel-cell catalyst layers, and functional films all start as concentrated suspensions — slurries, inks, and pastes whose flow decides whether the process succeeds.
Flow & memory
Measuring what slurries remember
Concentrated suspensions are structured fluids: their state depends on the history of flow, and that history can be read — or erased — deliberately.
- Yield stress & shear-thinning as dispersion fingerprints — how far a slurry departs from Newtonian behavior tells us how well its particles are dispersed.
- Shear history & rejuvenation — battery anode slurries show a stress window that erases shear memory without building new particle contacts — a quantitative basis for reproducible processing.
- Extensional response — cross-slot flows and capillary breakup separate weak links between particle clusters from strong bonds inside them.
Microstructure
Seeing structure inside opaque slurries
Bulk rheology alone cannot say why a slurry flows the way it does — so we probe the particle network directly, without dilution.
- Low-field NMR relaxometry — solvent relaxation locates binder adsorption thresholds, microstructural heterogeneity, and sedimentation in intact battery slurries.
- Small-angle scattering (USANS/SANS) — separates micron-scale agglomerate networks from sub-micron ionomer–carbon structure in catalyst inks.
- Dispersant mechanisms — how dispersant molecular weight redirects adsorption between active material and conductive additives — and what that costs electrochemically.
To the process
The slurry is a manufacturing variable
Our end goal: design formulation and mixing so the downstream process window is wide before the coater ever runs.
- Structure sets processability — solvent composition selects discrete agglomerates or percolated networks — and with them, coatability.
- Slurry-to-electrode memory — structure chosen at the slurry stage survives coating and drying into the final layer and its transport properties.
- Foundation for our applied work — battery, fuel-cell, and MLCC process research all build on this rheological groundwork.