Dr Matthew Butler Research Fellow   Office: B2.34 Phone: +44 (0)24 767 3512 Email: Matthew dot Butler at warwick dot ac dot uk

---

I am a research fellow working with Tom Montenegro-Johnson on microscale soft active matter.

Our project aims to understand how we can control the size change of certain swellable soft materials (hydrogels), and how this can be exploited to generate designed shape changes in components for use in microbots and microfluidic devices.

Research Interests

Broadly, I enjoy making fundamental mathematical models of complex real-world system, and working on projects that combine theory and experiments. My main topics of interest are:

• Poro-elasticity, hydrogel dynamics and swelling
• Surface tension problems, elasticity and elasto-capillarity
• Artificial microswimmers, micro-components and microfluidics
• Fluid dynamics, particularly viscous flows and lubrication theory
• Mathematical modelling, mechanics and asymptotic methods

Publications

• A New Class of Single-Material Non-Reciprocal Microactuators
  C. Maslen, A. Gholamipour-Shirazi, M. Butler, J. Kropacek, I. Rehor and T. Montenegro-Johnson
  Macromolecular Rapid Communications (2023)
• Chemically active filaments: Analysis and extensions of Slender Phoretic Theory
  Katsamba, M. Butler, L. Koens and T. Montenegro-Johnson [Joint first author]
  Soft Matter, 18, 7051-7063, (2022)
• The swelling and shrinking of spherical thermo-responsive hydrogels
  M. Butler and T. Montenegro-Johnson
  Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 947, A11 (2022)
• Liquid bridge splitting enhances normal and shear capillary adhesion on rough surfaces 
  M. Butler and D. Vella
  Journal of Colloid and Interface Science, 607, 514-529 (2022)
• Detachment in capillary adhesion: The relative roles of tilting and separation
  M. Butler and D. Vella
  IMA Journal of Applied Mathematics, 85, 673-702 (2020)
• Elasto-capillary adhesion: Effect of deformability on adhesion strength and detachment
  M. Butler, F. Box, T. Robert and D. Vella
  Physical Review Fluids, 4, 033601 (2019)

Thesis

Sticking with droplets: Mathematical modelling of capillary adhesion, University of Oxford
Submitted in 2020, supervised by Dominic Vella

Non-academic publications

Sticking with Droplets: How Having a Soft Foot Can Improve Capillary Adhesion
Mathematics Today (magazine article) from 2019