Andrea, tell me about
the physics of a wine glass
and what people do when
they pick one up before they drink.
When you have wine,
one thing you usually see
is this type of movement.
The idea why we do this
is to oxygenate the wine.
We want to make sure
there is enough oxygen,
enough surface for the oxygen
to transfer into the wine
and brought inside the wine
so it tastes better.
What's going on in the glass
that we need oxygen from the air
to get into the liquid
and help it along by swirling?
To get inside and be drawn inside
by the movement,
the fluid mechanics you create when
you start to shake your glass.
One simple way to look into that
would be to do dye visualisation.
We happen to have some dye here.
We can pick some of this...
..blue dye.
And make a small drop there.
It's really pretty!
Then, we start shaking.
The idea is that this is water,
it will diffuse very fast.
It will mix very fast.
The idea is to look at
what happens inside
and the type of fluid structure
we have inside,
which will determine this mixing
inside the glass.
Therefore, better oxygenation
for your glass of wine.
The dye is not just spreading out
into the glass,
it's swirling around, there is
a structure as the blue dye mixes in.
Exactly, so as we did
in this glass of wine,
you have two fluids,
which are mixable,
one was the blob of blue dye,
the other was the water,
to increase the mixing,
you want to make sure the surface
of contact of these two fluids
are as large as possible,
so they can diffuse into each other.
This is what mixing does,
you create a stirring action
and a flow of movement inside,
so that you start
deforming this blob of dye
and the moment you deform it,
you create a striation,
and you increase the surface of contact
between the two fluids
and you have diffusion.
That's what's happening
inside a wine glass,
the swirling helps you
mix these two things together.
The same principle is used
in your research. Tell me about that.
What we are studying
at the mixing lab at UCL
is a shaking system.
Here we have a 24 wells reactor.
The shaking system has the same
movement we saw in the glass,
we have this type of movement.
Here, we have different reactors,
each one of these squares
is a different reactor.
These are cell cultures.
You're trying to grow
living cells?
You have different combinations
of reactants
or cells or whatever.
The moment you start shaking, you try
to identify which combiation works best.
That is the one you might want to study.
What we've been doing in the lab
is study this type of shaking reactor.
We have some examples on the screen.
They are larger inside,
cylinders about this large.
10 cm diameter.
The real piece of engineering here
is that you want to scale this up.
We think of biologists growing
tiny cells in little petri dishes,
but if you want this
to be useful industrially,
this has to happen on a huge scale.
You have to be able to mix
on a huge scale as well.
That's the idea of the research.
In this case,
to look at the shaking system,
but we could have different types
of bio-reactors.
Stirred tank reactors,
when you use impellers,
or wave tank reactors, where you have
a different type of movement.
You have a movement
which creates a flow.
The flow is a mechanism
that improves the formation
of whatever reactants you have inside.
It improves the process
and makes it faster.
