The symposium brought together researchers from a highly cross-disciplinary background displaying the application and relevance of interfacial and transport engineering in a wide range of fields spanning novel microfabrication and assembly of electronics devices to medicinal chemistry. The symposium consisted of 24 papers presented by researchers from Canada, the U.S., and several European countries. This issue of The Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering (CJChE) contains seven articles selected from the presentations in the symposium, which have a decided chemical engineering slant, and are deemed relevant to the readers of the CJChE.
While the articles address interfacial and transport engineering concepts, these will hopefully also display the immense headway chemical engineering concepts have made into diverse fields. Some of these papers are contributions from mechanical and electrical engineering, and demonstrate how interdisciplinary engineering is becoming vital in modern synergistic engineering and scientific analysis. The papers address a wide range of experimental and theoretical topics, including measurement of contact angle at low gravity, simulations of electrokinetic flow in nanoscale porous media, the effect of surfactants on mitigation of pattern collapse on nanometre photoresist development, and electrowetting models for microdroplet actuation.
We are grateful to K. Nandakumar for giving us this opportunity to showcase the output from the symposium in The Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering. We also thank the authors who contributed these articles, and the reviewers for their constructive suggestions and criticisms. We hope that readers will find the articles informative, and also hope that this collaboration between the CJChE and the symposium will turn out to be a fruitful venture over successive years.