CENTER FOR COMPUTATION & TECHNOLOGY

Liquid-gas flows are ubiquitous in environmental and engineering applications. One category of flow of great importance in energy conversion devices is the formation of a liquid spray, a process called atomization. Due to their nonlinear and multiscale nature, such turbulent multi- phase flows present a significant modeling challenge, especially when novel control strategies such as electro-hydrodynamics are considered. For example, instabilities that develop at the liquid-gas interface are controlled by thin boundary layers, yet such instabilities impact the large-scale flow dynamics and influence atomization. In addition, flow variables exhibit dis- continuities across the phase interface, complex microscale dynamics arise due to surface ten- sion, and the interface develops highly complex corrugations.

With the advent of more powerful computing resources, simulating such flows from first prin- ciples is becoming viable. As with single-phase flows, numerical methods need to be carefully designed to guarantee convergence under grid refinement, primary conservation of key quan- tities such as mass and momentum, and excellent parallel performance. We will discuss how such properties can be obtained in the context of various liquid-gas turbulent flows, including a liquid jet in cross-flow and electro-hydrodynamic fuel atomization. 

Dr. Olivier Desjardins is currently an Associate Professor in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University. He received a Master of Science in Aero- nautics and Astronautics from ENSAE (Supaero) in Toulouse, France, and a Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University in 2004. He graduated from Stanford Uni- versity in June 2008 with a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering. His doctoral research on numeri- cal methods for accurate simulations of reactive multiphase turbulent flows was performed at the Center for Turbulence Research under the guidance of Prof. Heinz Pitsch.