Title: Phase Field Methods for Flows with Elastic Membranes

Speaker: Judith Hill, Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University
 
Date/Time: Wednesday, January 26, 2005, 9:00 to 10:00 a.m.
 
Location: Building 980, Room 95 (Sandia NM)

Brief Abstract: An open area of research in computational fluid dynamics is the study of multi-fluid flows, phenomena which arise in many real-world fluid mechanics applications. In this talk, a phase field method for implicitly capturing the location of the interfaces in binary fluids will be discussed.  This approach avoids the computational geometry complexities associated with fully Lagrangian or front-tracking Eulerian methods. These complexities are particularly pronounced on parallel computers.

Additionally, for flows with elastic membranes separating the fluids, a phase field formulation for the membrane stresses will be presented.  The coupled membrane-fluid flow formulation is discretized by a combined continuous/discontinuous Galerkin method, which lends itself to an inherently parallel implementation. A block Schur-complement preconditioner neutralizes the ill-conditioning of the coupled system due to disparate material properties. Parallel performance results demonstrate the efficacy of this preconditioner.