Back to Departmental Colloquium: Spring 2012
Departmental Colloquium
Date: Tuesday, Mar 20, 2012
Time: 4:15PM
Location: JWB 335
Andrea Bertozzi
University of California Los Angeles
Title |
Particle Laden Flow - applications from the Gulf Oil Spill to Spiral Concentrators |
Abstract |
This talk is about the challenges in modeling particle laden flow in viscous liquids and some of their applications. Particle settling in liquid is a complex process in which long range interactions are important due to the incompressibility of the fluid. Hinderance in particle settling is well-known as are other multi-particle effects such as shear-induced migration. We look at the basic physics of particle laden flow on an incline and show that this problem has a natural bifurcation between settling-dominated dynamics and dynamics dominated by the shear flow. In both cases the presence of particles greatly changes the flow structure from that of a single clear fluid. We also present some recent work connecting this physics to the modeling of particle separation in a spiral separator - used in the mining industry for separating different densities and sizes of particles in a slurry. Mathematical models include both systems of conservation laws (involving both classical and singular shock solutions) and flows with surface tension. |
Applied Mathematics