Anne Staples, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Biomedical Engineering & Mechanics
Virginia Tech
Wednesday, September 17, 2014, 1pm
801 22nd Street NW, Phillips Hall 640
Washington, DC 20052
Hosted by: Dr. Megan Leftwich ([email protected])
Abstract: The controlled pumping and mixing of microliters of fluid in microgeometries is a challenging problem. The state-of-the-art approach to flow delivery and regulation in complex microfluidic devices requires thee targeted actuation of arrays of pumps and valves using active controls and requires an entire associated tabletop system of accessories to power and control the flow in a single microscale device. In contrast, insects and many other terrestrial arthropods have evolved over millions of years to manage fluid flows at the microscale very efficiently. The honey bee, for example, is a small, autonomous organism containing two microfluidic systems, its respiratory and circulatory systems, that can increase its metabolic rate by two orders of magnitude almost instantaneously when it takes off in flight, demonstrating a dynamic range and level of control that are unparalleled in current engineered microfluidic systems. The respiratory systems of insects consist of complex networks of tracheal tubes. Air is drawn in through sets of openings called spiracles, and follows a branching path down to the tracheoles, which deliver oxygen directly to the cells for respiration. These tracheal networks have recently been found by X-ray synchrotron imaging to consist of essentially inelastic but locally (in time and space) collapsible tubes. Mathematical modeling and meshfree computations will be presented that describe this transport paradigm for gas flows at the micro scale.
Biographical Sketch: Anne Staples obtained her MEng and PhD degrees in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University in 2001 and 2006, respectively. While at Princeton she received the Larisse Rosentweig Klein Memorial Award for excellence in doctoral research. In 2006 she joined the Laboratory for Computational Physics and Fluid Dynamics at the Naval Research Laboratory as a National Academies/National Research Council Postdoctoral Research Associate. In 2009 she joined the faculty in the Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics (now Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics) at Virginia Tech as an Assistant Professor, where she currently resides. Her research involves computational approaches to problems in fluid dynamics with applications in biological fluid dynamics and in classical turbulence and numerical algorithms. She is a member of the American Physical Society and the Biomedical Engineering Society.