Team develops interface reconstruction method for studying drops in emulsions

Story posted August 8, 2006

Emulsions are significant to a variety of industrial applications, including the development of new materials, wastewater treatment, and pharmaceutical design. Currently, production of these emulsions relies heavily on trial and error. In hopes of improving the state of the art, Yuriko Renardy and her team at Virginia Tech began simulating the nature of drops of liquids in emulsions in 1997.

Previous schemes for determining the distribution of different-sized drops tend to produce errors that do not reconcile themselves no matter how fine-grained the simulation is. Most problematic are false currents within the mixture's flow. The Renardy team's interface reconstruction method, developed on NCSA's Copper supercomputer and previous platforms, eliminates these currents and other errors.

In 2005 and 2006, they used their algorithms to simulate the flow of two viscoelastic liquids. In viscoelastic liquids, drops slide, deform, and change orientation. The team also used the algorithms to predict the evolution of a Newtonian drop in a viscoelastic matrix liquid.

This research is supported by the National Science Foundation, DMS-0405810 (MPS) and CTS-0090381 (ENG).