Shahriar Afkhami

I will present some of our recent calculations on the process of breakup of elongated droplets and bubbles in a symmetric T-junction geometry at low capillary numbers. We hypothesize that for this strongly confined geometry, at small (or moderate) capillary numbers, the breakup is more
likely to be caused by an increased upstream pressure due to lubrication flow in a thin film sandwiched between the drop and the channel wall and assert this hypothesis with direct numerical simulations. Benchmark computations are presented and compared with asymptotic solutions for code validation. I will then present some scaling relationships and will
confirm these scaling laws with full numerical solutions. I will conclude with demonstrating 3D simulations and some new directions to explore. This work is jointly done with Alex Leshansky at Technion.