Victor Breedveld
Assistant Professor
Contact Information
Building: Ford ES&T
Office:
1222
Phone: 404.894.5134
Fax: 404.894.2866
email
Mailing Address
Georgia Institute of Technology
School of Chemical &
Biomolecular Engineering
311 Ferst Drive, N.W.
Atlanta, GA 30332-0100
Links
Victor Breedveld
Education
M.S. 1996 University of Twente, the Netherlands
Ph.D. 2000 University of Twente, the Netherlands
Research Interests
Dr. Breedveld's research theme is "Structure and Rheology of Complex Fluids", investigating the structure and mechanical strength of materials that are neither simple Newtonian fluids nor elastic solids. Complex fluids encompass a large variety of materials: food products, polymer melts and solutions, coatings, personal care products, biological fluids and gels, etc. The mechanical properties (visco-elasticity, shear viscosity) are controlled by the microscopic molecular structure, which can be tuned by changing the interactions between molecules. The interplay between molecular structure and rheology is the focus of his research.
Experimental research in Dr. Breedveld's group is centered around two rheological techniques: conventional macrorheology on a rheometer and recently developed microrheology. Macrorheology studies the mechanical properties by deforming a fluid sample (0.5 to 10ml) in a controlled way in a rheometer and measuring the relation between applied stress and resulting deformation. Microrheology employs sub-micron particles as mechanical probes. The thermal fluctuations of these particles can be used as the driving force (~kT) and the resulting Brownian motion can be analyzed under an optical microscope to extract rheological information about the surrounding fluid.
The approach offers a number of unique opportunities. Due to the small sample size (1 microliter is often sufficient), microrheology is very suitable to investigate the structure and mechanical properties of expensive and rare materials. Microrheological measurements are much faster than conventional approaches, thus enabling high-throughput screening of rheological properties. Last but not least, the size of the probe particles allows for localized rheology measurements with micrometer spatial resolution, so that inhomogeneities in the structure can be detected. Capitalizing on these advantages of the novel technique, Dr. Breedveld currently focuses on the local rheology of bioengineering materials, such as tissue engineering scaffolds and on high-throughput applications for systems where screening and optimization of rheological properties is of importance.
Dr. Breedveld is a member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and the Society of Rheology.