CBC Talk on Potential Flow With Free Boundaries Using the Level Set Method - January 18, 2016
Total number of participants: 9
Total number of guests outside of CBC: 1
Number of different nationalities represented: 6
Total number of speakers: 1
Total number of talks: 1
About the speaker
Maria Garzon is a full-time professor at Oviedo University, Oviedo, Spain and also a visiting scholar at LBNL. She graduated from the Superior Mining School, Oviedo, Spain in mining engineering, and she received her Ph.D. in mining engineering from the University of Oviedo as well. Her research is in embedded potential flow models and level set methods, and numerical methods for free boundary problems. Garzon is currently developing embedded potential methods for electrical charged drops in a 3D formulation to simulate industrial electro-spray devices.
Potential flow with free boundaries using the level set method.
A review of some electro-hydrodynamic applications.
Many interesting fluid interface problems, such as wave propagation and breaking, droplet and bubble break-up, electro-jetting, rain drops, etc. can be modeled using the assumption of potential flow. In these problems, an interface needs to be advanced by a velocity determined by the solution of a surface partial differential equation posed on this moving boundary. A standard approach comes from a Lagrangian-Eulerian formulation of the potential flow equations together with some sort of front tracking method.
This Lagrangian approach is prone to fail when break-up or merging processes appear. Both mathematical and computational difficulties occur when the free boundary changes topology. By using ideas from a level set formulation, the two surface equations of the Lagrangian formulation can be implicitly embedded in PDEs posed in one higher dimension on a fixed domain. The advantage of this approach is that it seamlessly allows topologically breakup or merging of the fluid domain.
We present numerical results of a solitary wave breaking, the Rayleigh-Taylor instability of a fluid column, droplets and bubbles breaking-up and the electrical droplet distortion and subsequent jet emission.