Handbook

Complex fluids are the building blocks of sophisticated consumer products, with emulsions, foams, aerosols, and particle dispersions being carefully designed to control properties including texture, viscosity, colour, taste, and feel. In this course, you will discover the links between molecules, self-assembly, and the macroscopic properties that enable food formulation and processing, pharmaceutical development and testing, and specialty fluid chemical products.

By investigating consumer products and formulated food products, you will learn about the structures that molecules can form, why interfaces are so important to the properties of materials, and the fundamental forces and energies involved in their equilibrium and kinetic behaviour. You will be able to explain the engineering of fluid products in terms of Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluids and see how rheology in turn influences mixing, dispersing, stability and shelf-life. Through case studies and your own investigations, you will look in detail at the theoretical, experimental, and analytical advances across a range of different applications of complex fluids.