Guest lectures and seminars - Page 41
Abstract: What links a baby’s first breath to adhesive debonding, enhanced oil recovery, filtration or multiphase microfluidics? These processes all involve two-phase flows in rigid or elastic confined vessels and are often prone to interfacial instabilities. The canonical viscous fingering instability, which occurs when air displaces a viscous fluid in the narrow gap between two parallel plates, offers a versatile testbed for such phenomena. In this talk, I will use both experiments and numerical simulations of depth-averaged models to explore several aspects of bubble dynamics in Hele-Shaw cells. I will first show how the onset of fingering can be suppressed when replacing the upper plate of the vessel with an elastic sheet. Interfacial flows in narrow gaps can also exhibit considerable disorder, but they are rarely investigated from a dynamical systems’ perspective. I will show how compliance can promote rich multiplicity of front propagation modes in a channel before turning to bubble propagation in a rigid channel with a depth perturbation. There I will explore how the bubble’s organised transient dynamics is orchestrated by weakly-unstable steady propagation modes, and how its long-term behaviour may be practically unpredictable.
This talk is part of the Mechanics Lunch Seminar series. Bring-your-own-lunch and lots of questions. Hybrid format via Zoom possible on demand (contact timokoch at uio.no)
Abstract: A random, labyrinthine pattern emerges during slow drainage of a granular-fluid system in two- dimensional confinement. Compacted grains are pushed ahead of the fluid-air interface, which becomes unstable due to a competition between capillary forces and the frictional stress mobilized by grain-grain contact networks. We reproduce the pattern formation process in numerical simulations and present an analytical treatment that predicts the characteristic length scale of the labyrinth structure. The pattern length scale decreases with increasing volume fraction of grains in the system and increases with the system thickness. By tilting the model, aligned finger structures, with a characteristic width, emerge. A transition from vertical to horizontal alignment of the finger structures is observed as the tilting angle and the granular density are varied. The dynamics is reproduced in simulations. We also show how the system may explain patterns observed in nature, created during the early stages of a dike formation.
This talk is part of the Mechanics Lunch Seminar series. Bring-your-own-lunch and lots of questions. Hybrid format via Zoom possible on demand (contact timokoch at uio.no)
C*-algebra seminar by Alexander Stolin