Interfacial Models for Drop Dynamics in Volume-Tracking Frameworks

Professor R. H. Rangel
Franz Hernandez, Ph.D. student

Our research focuses on the numerical solution of multiphase fluid flows with relevant surface-tension effects, solid-fluid interaction, particulate flows and viscoelastic fluid flows, in order to study drop dynamics and the interaction of drops with rigid particles and walls. The motivation of our work is the understanding of the processes involved in biological-cell lysis and the transport of droplets in micro-channels. The fundamental equations are discretized following a semi-implicit finite-volume approach and the following models are considered: a high-resolution method for the advection terms (linear momentum equation); the continuum surface force model (CSF) for surface tension; the flux-corrected transport (FCT) algorithm and the piecewise-linear interface construction (PLIC) method for the advection of the volume fraction (two-fluid model); the distributed Lagrange multiplier (DLM) method for the inclusion of rigid particles; and viscoelastic constitutive models for Oldroyd-B, Giesekus and FENE-P fluids. We are interested in optimizing codes for multi-core processor architectures, so we develop codes in Fortran and C++ using libraries for parallelization/vectorization (OpenMP, MPI and OpenCL). Our research is limited to study the disruption and breakup of drops, and the conditions that lead to high deformation. In that sense, the critical capillary number for a given flow, geometry, Reynolds number and ratio of properties is sought. Future work is looking into considering viscoelastic and thick-membrane effects

 

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