Facilities
Lab and facilities
The lab is being set up ahead of the group's first semester in September 2026.
Capabilities
What we work with
The group's work runs from fluid handling at the bench to simulation on a workstation, and most projects touch both.
Separation and transport experiments
Bench-scale rigs for measuring how mass and heat cross an interface: filtration and crossflow cells under controlled pressure, temperature, and flow, plus thermally driven configurations for phase-change separations. Conditions are logged continuously so transient behavior can be resolved, and fluid handling is kept separate for aqueous and nonaqueous dielectric streams.
Membrane and surface preparation
Substrate cleaning, coating, and chemical functionalization for the surfaces we test. Making, testing, and revising a surface in the same lab shortens the loop between a hypothesis about interfacial behavior and a measurement of it.
Characterization and analysis
Wettability and surface energy measurement for the interfaces we modify, and solution-phase analysis (conductivity, pH, optical absorbance, ion-selective measurement) to track what crosses a membrane and what does not. Microscopy and elemental analysis come through shared departmental and college instruments.
Computation and data analysis
Workstations for molecular dynamics, computational fluid dynamics, and process-scale modeling, with a Python stack for data analysis and machine learning; larger runs go to institutional and national computing resources. We work mainly with open-source tools, which keeps results reproducible and the barrier low for students.
Lab space
The group is based in the Department of Physics and Engineering at Wheaton College, with bench space for fluid handling and separation experiments alongside desk space for modeling and analysis. Students also have access to shared departmental instrumentation and fabrication facilities for work that goes beyond what the group keeps in its own space.