Pier Luca Maffettone is the 2023 Weissenberg Awardee
Pier Luca Maffettone is Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University Federico II of Naples, Italy. He served from 2006 to 2011 as Coordinator of the PhD program in Chemical Engineering, from 2008 to 2012 as President of the Bachelor and of the Master of Science Courses in Chemical Engineering, from 2013 to 2018 as Chairman of the Department of Chemical, Materials, and Production Engineering, and since 2020 as Member of the University Board. He co-chaired AERC 2007 in Naples. He also served from 2014 to 2020 as a Member at large of the Executive Committee of the European Society of Rheology. His scientific activity is focused on modeling and simulation of the flow behavior of soft matter. He is currently member of the Editorial Board of Rheologica Acta and of Journal of Non-Newtonian Fluid Mechanics, and a Fellow of the Society of Rheology. He was visiting scientist at the University of Delaware (USA), at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium), at the Stanford University (USA), and at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (Japan).
In the early stage of his scientific career, working in the group of G. Marrucci he analyzed the rheology of liquid crystalline polymers within the framework of the rigid rod model of Doi and Hess both in bulk and as monolayers in collaboration with the group of Gerry Fuller at Stanford. Later, he showed the occurrence of “Rheo-Chaos” in shear flows. He proposed, in collaboration with Mario Minale, a simple but effective toy model for the deformation of a drop in linear flows with Newtonian and/or viscoelastic liquids. The predictions of this model have been used as a rheological guide in several polymer blends and emulsion applications. The work on cross-flow migration of particles suspended in viscoelastic liquids started as a joint effort together with the group of Jan Vermant in Leuven and with Martien Hulsen in Eindhoven. The cross-streamline migration of a spherical particle in a viscoelastic fluid flowing in a wide slit microdevice was investigated through 3D finite element simulations. A multiplicity of stable positions was discovered, whereby the particle is driven towards the channel center-plane or the closest wall depending on its initial position through the gap, thus leading to the existence of an unstable separatrix. This phenomenon, a viscoelastic reversal of the well-known Segré-Silberberg effect driven by inertia, led to the development of Rheo-Engineered microfluidics for Lab-On-a-Chip applications. The cross-flow particle migration was also used to build a micro-rheometer to estimate relaxation times of viscoelastic fluids as low as milliseconds. He recently addressed, in collaboration with Gerry Fuller, the dynamics of film rupture with viscoelastic interfaces, revealing the existence of a novel breakage scenario.
Award Citation: For contributing to a fundamental understanding of particle migration in viscoelastic fluids, also leading to the development of useful micro-rheological devices. For developing simple and successful models for the rheology of dilute blends of immiscible fluids.
