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Applied Mathematics Colloquium

Friday, March 7, 11:30 am
Cullimore Lecture Hall II
New Jersey Institute of Technology

Some Problems in Interfacial Electrohydrodynamics

Demetrius Papageorgiou

Department of Mathematical Sciences

New Jersey Institute of Technology

Newark, NJ

Abstract

Flows with free surfaces are important in many applications and occur for a variety of flow regimes. This talk is concerned with viscous flows with applications found in microfluidics. In many processes it is desirable to have an effective way to control the spatiotemporal dynamics of free surface flows. This is a hard problem because the position of the interface must be determined as part of the solution. Adding to the difficulties is the possibility of singular events such as interface touchdown (i.e. a formation of a dry spot), or droplet formation through topological transitions. It is important, therefore, to derive and analyze and compute extensively simpler but physically meaningful models. This talk will review such models when inelectric fields are acting as motivated by applications. Liquid film problems over flat or topographically patterned substrates will be analyzed and comparisons with direct numerical simulations will be presented. It will be shown that analytical structures do exceptionally well in describing the direct simulations, pointing the way to a significant gain in computational time. Some future directions will finally be presented.