Enthought Microrheology Lab

The Enthought Microrheology Lab application supports analysis based on the latest techniques in microrheology, capturing Brownian motion in small amounts of materials to understand their rheological properties at a microscopic level.

Download the academic version now for free

Advantages Over Bulk Rheological Analysis

The technique of microrheology, pioneered at Harvard's Experimental Soft Condensed Matter Group, consists of capturing the motion of micron-scale tracer particles in a complex fluid. In contrast to conventional bulk rheological analysis, this technique:

Uses much smaller sample sizes.
Measures viscosity without mechanical shear.
Detects phase separation on fast time scales without applying artificial forces, such as heating or centrifugation.
Analyzes complex mixtures that are inaccessible to conventional rheology, such as semi-flexible polymer solutions.
Allows non-invasive study of changes in material properties of cells.

Interactive Analysis for Heterogeneous Mixtures

The Enthought Microrheology Lab application goes beyond generating static plots of data, to support live updating of plots based on your selections. You can assign tracers to “clusters” and plot data for specific clusters, for example to separately analyze the properties of different fluids in a mixture. As you change cluster membership, related plots are automatically updated.

Available plot types include:

Tracers: Locations of tracer beads over time.
Tracers MSD: Mean squared displacement of tracers over time.
MSD: Mean MSD, with range bars.
Compliance: Inverse of the elastic modulus over a range of tau (time interval) values.
Alpha: Slope of log(MSD) vs. log(tau) over a range of tau values.
Viscosity: for a set of tracers, with range bars.
Moduli: Elastic modulus and loss modulus, at a range of frequencies.
Histogram: MSDs for a set of tracers at a given tau value.
Van Hove: Gaussian distribution curve fitted to a logarithmic histogram of displacements at a given tau value.