Effect of Surfactant Dynamics on Flow Patterns Inside Drops Moving in Rectangular Microfluidic Channels

Drops contained in an immiscible liquid phase are attractive as microreactors, enabling sound statistical analysis of reactions performed on ensembles of samples in a microfluidic device. Many applications have specific requirements for the values of local shear stress inside the drops and, thus, knowledge of the flow field is required. This is complicated in commonly used rectangular channels by the flow of the continuous phase in the corners, which also affects the flow inside the drops. In addition, a number of chemical species are present inside the drops, of which some may be surface-active. This work presents a novel experimental study of the flow fields of drops moving in a rectangular microfluidic channel when a surfactant is added to the dispersed phase. Four surfactants with different surface activities are used. Flow fields are measured using Ghost Particle Velocimetry, carried out at different channel depths to account for the 3-D flow structure. It is shown that the effect of the surfactant depends on the characteristic adsorption time. For fast-equilibrating surfactants with a characteristic time scale of adsorption that is much smaller than the characteristic time of surface deformation, this effect is related only to the decrease in interfacial tension, and can be accounted for by the change in capillary number. For slowly equilibrating surfactants, Marangoni stresses accelerate the corner flow, which changes the flow patterns inside the drop considerably.

Ghost particle reduction in particle streak velocimetry

Ghost particles are ambiguities in the process of the 3D-reconstruction of seeding particles detected in short-exposure imaging for volumetric flow velocimetry. 3D Particle Streak Velocimetry (3D-PSV) relies on long-exposure images, where the pathlines of the seeding particles are imaged as streaks. In this work, we demonstrate the inherent suitability of 3D-PSV for ghost particle rejection by calculating the probability of ghost streak generation in different scenarios and comparing our results to simulations.

A scalable Euler–Lagrange approach for multiphase flow simulation on spectral elements

Multiphase flow can be difficult to simulate with high accuracy due to the wide range of scales associated with various multiphase phenomena. These scales may range from the size of individual particles to the entire domain of interest. Traditionally, large scale systems can only be simulated using averaging approaches that filter out the locations of individual particles. In this work, the Euler–Lagrange method is used to simulate large-scale dense particle systems in which each individual particle is tracked. In order to accomplish this, the highly scalable spectral element code nek5000 has been extended to handle the multiple levels of multiphase coupling in these systems. These levels include what has been called one-, two-, and four-way coupling. Here, each level has been separated to detail the computational impact of each stage. A binned ghost particle algorithm has also been developed to efficiently handle the challenges of two- and four-way coupling in a parallel processing context. The algorithms and their implementations are then shown to scale to 65,536 Message Passing Interface (MPI) ranks in both the strong and weak limits. After this, validation is performed through simulation of a small-scale fluidized bed. Lastly, a large-scale fluidized bed is simulated with 65,536 MPI ranks and is able to capture the unique physics of the onset of fluidization.

Application Research of an Efficient and Stable Boundary Processing Method for the SPH Method

The boundary truncation of the kernel function affects the numerical accuracy and calculation stability of the smooth particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method and has been one of the key research fields for this method. In this paper, an efficient and stable boundary processing method for the SPH method was introduced by adopting an improved boundary interpolation method (i.e., the improved Shepard method) which needs only the sum of direct accumulation for fixed-boundary particles to improve the numerical stability and computational efficiency of the fixed ghost particle method. The improvement effect of the method was demonstrated by comparing it with different interpolation methods using the cases of still water, a wave generated by dam-breaking, and a solitary wave attacking problem with fixed walls and a moveable wall. The results showed that the new boundary processing method for SPH can help remarkably improve the efficiency of calculation and reduce the oscillations of pressure when simulating various flows.

A MULTI-NODE APPROACH TO SIMULATE THIN COASTAL STRUCTURES IN THE SPH CONTEXT

We propose an improvement in modeling solid boundary conditions for 2D weakly-compressible Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations for cases in which the thickness of the body is small compared to the desired particle size and the fluid surrounds the body from more than one side. Specifically, the fixed ghost particles technique developed by Marrone et al. (2011), based on interpolation nodes located within the fluid domain, is here extended to a multi-node approach. The fluid domain is thus divided into various sub-areas and an interpolation node for the considered solid particle is associated to every sub-area. Consequently, the solid particles present an array of values interpolated at different sub-areas for the same physical quantity. When a fluid particle located in a specific region interacts with a multi-node fixed ghost particle, the last assumes the field values interpolated in the reference area through the associated node. The present modeling allows to adopt a coarser spatial resolution to model the same physical problem, resulting in a reduction of the computational cost. The proposed solid boundary treatment is applied to horizontal decks and perforated wall-caisson breakwaters subjected to regular waves. In this context, an automatic hybrid diffusive formulation is introduced in order to prevent shock waves during water impacts and preserve the hydrostatic pressure. The formulation is obtained by defining a variable parameter detecting the occurrence of relevant density gradients induced by fluid impacts, resulting in an automatic switch between the two formulations.