Dear Colleagues,

Heat and mass transport in microchannels is key to diverse applications that span many disciplines in science and engineering, from mechanical, chemical, energy, and environmental engineering, to biological and medical science.

Notable examples range from the thermal management of power electronics to the mobilization of pollutants in unsaturated soil, the capillary-cleaning of fouling and biofilms, microencapsulation for drug delivery, the medical treatment of diseased tissues, the deformability of cells in biofluids, and (bio)chemical microreactor technology, to name a few.

Within microchannels, unlike large-scale flows, phenomena such as viscous heating, surface tension, interfacial resistance to heat and mass transfer, van der Waals interactions, diffusiophoresis, and diffusioosmosis can have dominant effects on the transport mechanisms.

Although recent advances in microfabrication techniques such as micromilling, embossing technology, additive manufacturing, and photolithography have allowed substantial reduction in microchannel size and manufacturing cost, there is still a great deal of uncertainty in our understanding of the underlying flow physics.

Therefore, new insight into the governing flow/heat-transfer mechanisms at the microscale, which are required for the optimal development, design, and operation of next-generation microfluidic devices, is the driving motivation of this Special Issue.

This Special Issue welcomes contributions that focus on recent developments in single and multiphase flows in microchannels, including but not restricted to gas–liquid, liquid–liquid, particle-laden, and colloidal-suspension flows; the impact of channel geometry on fluid dynamics and heat transfer; fundamental aspects of thin-film dynamics and evaporation; flow boiling heat transfer and critical heat flux; flow boiling instabilities in multimicrochannel evaporators; the enhancement of single-phase cooling; microstructured surfaces; thermally and surfactant-driven Marangoni flows; electrokinetics; diffusiophoresis; diffusioosmosis; and theoretical approaches such as lubrication theory and asymptotics.

We invite contributions in all areas of experimental and computational methods, multiscale models, and theoretical approaches that focus on the aforementioned mechanisms dominated by the microscale.

Dr. Beatrice Pulvirenti
Guest Editor

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• microfluidics
• single-phase flow
• multiphase flow
• flow boiling
• thin-films
• computational fluid mechanics
• multiscale modelling