Xuehua Zhang, PhD

Area of Study / Keywords

Supervisor Nanomaterials and Nanofabrication Transport Phenomena - Fluid dynamics/ mass and heat transfer Nanomaterials and Nanofabrication Oil Sands Energy Surface Science and Engineering Surface and interfacial science

About

Professor Xuehua Zhang completed her PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University (Xujiahui Campus). After her PhD study, she first worked as an Endeavour Research Fellow in Department of Applied Math, Australian National University in Canberra (capital of Australia), and then was a postdoctoral fellow in the group of Professor William Ducker at University of Melbourne. She was awarded with a prestigious ARC Postdoctoral Fellowship and then with also ARC Future Fellowship. In September 2017, she moved to Edmonton, and was appointed as a Professor in Chemical and Materials Engineering, University of Alberta. She hold Canada Research Chair (Tier 1), and serves as an Associate Editor for Soft Matter, a Royal Society of Chemistry journal. Her research areas span from colloid and interface sciences, nanomaterials to chemical engineering. She leads a collaborative research group consisting of bright and highly motivated graduate students and postdocs.  

Research

• Cold plasma activation (MB-CPA) as clean technology for wastewater treatment and sustainable agriculture
• Evaporation enhanced by renewable energy for fast volume reduction of wastewater
• Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) for ultrasensitive and quantitative chemical analysis
• Liquid-liquid phase separation, coacervation, ouzo effect, and surface nanodroplets
• Micro/nanobubbles in multicomponent systems out of equilibrium
• Experimental study and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations of slurry flows in pipeline

Keywords: cold plasma, ultrasensitive analysis, slurry flow, wastewater, sustainable agriculture 

Teaching

Thermodynamics 

Soft Matter and Interfaces