Ercofact

European Research Community On Flow, Turbulence And Combustion

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The development of microscale systems has been growing rapidly, making many engineering applications possible. It is now commonly accepted that miniaturization associated to microtechnologies will give birth in the near future to new objects which will affect industrial practice and our daily life in many aspects. There is no end to the field of application, from basic mixing, to compact heat exchanger, chip cooling in electronic devices, biological systems to micro total analysis systems (MicroTAS).

Microfluidics and Microheat constitutes a specific research area in the sense that some scale-effects that are neglected in macrosystems can then become dominant at the micro level. Molecular non-continuum effects may also play an important part, in particular in micro-gas flows. Mixing in microsystems is on the other hand a real problem in micro devices wherein the flow is basically laminar, and that is one of the limiting factors in performances that can be achieved in MicroTAS and lab-on-chip applications. Despite the huge progress achieved in these domains, some key problems still remain unanswered, such as those encountered in micro-separation strategies. However, microfluidics and microheat technologies represent one of the best arenas for innovation and the emergence of green technologies.

The course aims to provide the following: