Micro- and nanoscaled fluid mechanics are rapidly emerging as important supporting fields in biomedical technology, nanotechnology, etc., as well as being important fields of study in their own right. Despite the common use of these terms in the literature, the fluid behavior at these small length scales is quite often misunderstood. The topics of continuum breakdown, electrokinetics, and surface phenomena will be discussed in this presentation and hopefully some light shed on what nanofluidics really is.

Professor Wereley completed his masters and doctoral research in Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University. He joined the Purdue University faculty in August of 1999 after a two-year postdoctoral appointment at the University of California Santa Barbara in the Department of Mechanical and Environmental Engineering. He is the co-inventor of the micro-Particle Image Velocimetry technique and co-author of Fundamentals and Applications of Microfluidics (Artech House, 2002).

NCN@Purdue Student Leadership Team
Network for Computational Nanotechnology
The Institute for Nanoelectronics and Computing

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Steve Wereley (2006), "What is "Nanofluidics"? or The Nano-izing of Fluid Mechanics," https://nanohub.org/resources/1604.

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1. carbon nanotubes
2. materials science
3. Nano Electro-Mechanical Systems (NEMS)
4. NEMS/MEMS
5. tutorial