Rosell Llompart, Joan

Biography

He graduated in Physics in 1987 from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Until his PhD (awarded in 1994 at Yale University), he worked with Prof. J. Fernández de la Mora on aerodynamic focusing, inertial impaction, electrospray atomization, and differential mobility analysis. As postdoc associate with Prof. John B. Fenn at Virginia Commonwealth University, he carried research on electrospray ionization mass spectrometry. In 1996 he joined Aradigm Corporation (Hayward CA, USA) to help develop liquid micro-jet technology for inhalation drug delivery. There he co-discovered, with Prof. Alfonso Gañán-Calvo of Universidad de Sevilla (Spain), the Flow Blurring regime for fine liquid atomization. Since joining ICREA and Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV) in 2004, his research has focused on electrospray and electrospinning for the manufacturing of nanomaterials. He leads the Droplets, intErfaces, and floWs (DEW) research lab at URV.

Research Interest

Under the action of electrostatic fields, liquid interfaces can form stable ultrathin liquid jets, thinner than one hundreth of a human hair. We use such "electro-hydrodynamic" jets and the droplets they lead to as templates for the one-step manufacturing of nanofibers, microparticles, and nanoparticles. Such structures (fibers and particles) are building blocks for making larger structures which find use in many fields, e.g. heterogeneous catalysis, non-linear optics, drug delivery, chemical sensing, energy, and others. I am currently devising strategies for engineering the internal nanostructure of such micro/nano-blocks, as well as for their assembly into suprastructures. A key aspect of the research is the modelling of underlying physical and physicochemical processes, and the understanding the function-structure relationships of the synthesized materials. I am also investigating the scaling up into arrays of electro-hydrodynamic emitters for materials production.