Abstract
Deformation and fragmentation of drops under aerodynamic forcing is a ubiquitous fundamental phenomenon that has implications for different engineered and natural processes, such as aerial fire-retardant dispersal and respiratory droplet generation. Depending on the aerodynamic forcing on the drop, it can be in a spectrum of different regimes, from oscillatory deformation regime at the lowest Weber number (We < 10) to catastrophic breakup at We ~ O(102). The current study quantifies and characterizes the dynamics of a drop subjected to aerodynamic forcing that results in its deformation and the threshold to its eventual fragmentation. Previous studies have primarily focused on Newtonian and spherical drops. The current study expands this to non-spherical drops and non-Newtonian spherical drops. First, through the presentation, we will lay out a systematic way of quantifying the effect of the initial shape of the drop on its deformation dynamics. Next, the effect of different non-Newtonian rheology, visco-plasticity, and shear-thinning, on the deformation dynamics of the drop will be presented. The dynamics of the drop has been quantified using experimentally validated axisymmetric and 3D volume of fluid (VoF) based simulations conducted on petascale supercomputers like Blue Waters and Frontera.
About the Speaker
Som is an assistant professor at the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department at Utah State University (USU) since 2019. He completed his MS and PhD in Civil Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) under the mentorship of Prof. Marcelo H. Garcia. He then worked as a post-doctoral researcher in Scientific Computing at the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, UIUC, under the mentorship of Prof. Paul Fischer. Next, he spent a year as a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Mathematics, City University of New York, interjected with the Bayfield Visiting Fellowship in environmental fluid dynamics at the Energy and Environment Institute, University of Hull, UK. Som is interested in quantifying and predicting complex flow and transport phenomena in the natural and built environment, using high-fidelity CFD and uncertainty-quantified ML surrogates. At USU, Som teaches Fluid Mechanics, Numerical Methods, and Spectral Element Methods, and has been nominated twice as the Undergraduate Research Mentor of the Year.
Host: Professor Leonardo Chamorro