Xu Zhang

Xu Zhang is a graduate student in mechanical engineering whose work explores unexpected dynamics in dense suspensions through controlled bubble phenomena. Dense suspensions—particles at high concentration suspended in liquid—exhibit shear thickening and jamming, yet their behavior in thin films remains poorly understood. When bubbles burst in these suspensions, they fracture and wrinkle rather than opening smoothly. Xu uses high-speed reflectance imaging and X-ray radiography combined with MATLAB processing pipelines to track fracture propagation and quantify film drainage dynamics. Remarkably, successive bubbles follow identical trajectories previously selected by initial injections, indicating material memory persisting 30 minutes beyond intrinsic relaxation timescales—a phenomenon he has quantified through trajectory correlation functions. As a MathWorks Fellow, Xu will develop phase-field models solving nonlinear PDEs accounting for elastic deformation and energy dissipation. Understanding these phenomena lays the groundwork for predicting behavior in dense suspensions across industrial processing, geophysical flows, and engineered particulate systems.