arXiv subjects

Uǧis Lācis

Publications and source records attributed to Uǧis Lācis.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2022

Nanoscale sheared droplet: Volume-of-Fluid, phase-field and no-slip molecular dynamics

The motion of the three-phase contact line between two immiscible fluids and a solid surface arises in a variety of wetting phenomena and technological applications. One challenge in continuum theory is the effective representation of molecular phenomena close to the contact line. Here, we characterize the molecular processes of the moving contact line to assess the accuracy of two different continuum two-phase models. Specifically, molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of a two-dimensional droplet between two moving plates are used to create reference data for different capillary numbers and contact angles. We use a simple-point-charge/extended (SPC/E) water model with particle-mesh Ewald electrostatics treatment. This model provides a very small slip and a more realistic representation of the molecular physics than Lennards-Jones models. The Cahn-Hilliard phase-field model and the Volume-of-Fluid model are calibrated against the drop displacement from MD reference data. It is demonstrated that the calibrated continuum models can accurately capture droplet displacement and droplet breakup for different capillary numbers and contact angles. However, we also observe differences between continuum and atomistic simulations in describing the transient and unsteady droplet behavior, in particular, close to dynamical wetting transitions. The molecular dynamics of the sheared droplet provide insight of the line friction experienced by the advancing and receding contact lines and evidence of large-scale temporal "stick-slip" like oscillations. The presented results will serve as a stepping stone towards developing accurate continuum models for nanoscale hydrodynamics.

physics.flu-dyn↗

arXiv2021

Near-wall turbulence alteration with the Transpiration-Resistance Model

A set of boundary conditions called the Transpiration-Resistance Model (TRM) are investigated in altering near-wall turbulence. The TRM has been previously proposed by \citet{Lacis2020} as a means of representing the net effect of surface micro-textures on their overlying bulk flows. It encompasses conventional Navier-slip boundary conditions relating the streamwise and spanwise velocities to their respective shears through the slip lengths $\ell_x$ and $\ell_z$. In addition, it features a transpiration condition accounting for the changes induced in the wall-normal velocity by expressing it in terms of variations of the wall-parallel velocity shears through the transpiration lengths $m_x$ and $m_z$. Greater levels of drag increase occur when more transpiration takes place at the boundary plane, with turbulent transpiration being predominately coupled to the spanwise shear component for canonical near-wall turbulence. The TRM can reproduce the effect of a homogeneous and structured roughness up to ${k^+}\,{\approx18}$. In this transitionally rough flow regime, the transpiration lengths of the TRM must be empirically determined. The \emph{transpiration factor} is defined as the product between the slip and transpiration lengths, i.e. $(m\ell)_{x,z}$. This factor contains the compound effect of the wall-parallel velocity occurring at the boundary plane and increased permeability, both of which lead to the transport of momentum in the wall-normal direction. A linear relation between the transpiration factor and the roughness function is observed for regularly textured surfaces in the transitionally rough regime of turbulence. The relations obtained between the transpiration factor and the roughness function show that such effective flow quantities can be suitable measures for characterizing rough surfaces in this flow regime.

physics.flu-dyn↗

arXiv2021

The Brinkman viscosity for porous media exposed to a free flow

The Brinkman equation has found great popularity in modelling the interfacial flow between free fluid and a porous medium. However, it is still unclear how to determine an appropriate effective Brinkman viscosity without resolving the flow at the pore scale. Here, we propose to determine the Brinkman viscosity for rough porous media from the interface slip length and the interior permeability. Both slip and permeability can be determined from unit-cell analysis, thus enabling an a priori estimate of the effective viscosity. By comparing the velocity distribution in the porous material predicted from the Brinkman equation with that obtained from pore-scale resolved simulations, we show that modelling errors are $\sim 10\%$ and not larger than $40\%$. We highlight the physical origins of the obtained errors and demonstrate that the Brinkman model can be much more accurate for irregular porous structures.

physics.flu-dyn↗

arXiv2020

Steady moving contact line of water over a no-slip substrate

The movement of the triple contact line plays a crucial role in many applications such as ink-jet printing, liquid coating and drainage (imbibition) in porous media. To design accurate computational tools for these applications, predictive models of the moving contact line are needed. However, the basic mechanisms responsible for movement of the triple contact line are not well understood but still debated. We investigate the movement of the contact line between water, vapour and a silica-like solid surface under steady conditions in low capillary number regime. We use molecular dynamics (MD) with an atomistic water model to simulate a nanoscopic drop between two moving plates. We include hydrogen bonding between the water molecules and the solid substrate, which leads to a sub-molecular slip length. We benchmark two continuum methods, the Cahn-Hilliard phase-field (PF) model and a volume-of-fluid (VOF) model, against MD results. We show that both continuum models can reproduce the statistical measures obtained from MD reasonably well, with a trade-off in accuracy. We demonstrate the importance of the phase field mobility parameter and the local slip length in accurately modelling the moving contact line.

physics.flu-dyn↗

arXiv2019

Transfer of mass and momentum at rough and porous surfaces

The surface texture of materials plays a critical role in wettability, turbulence and transport phenomena. In order to design surfaces for these applications, it is desirable to characterise non-smooth and porous materials by their ability to exchange mass and momentum with flowing fluids. While the underlying physics of the tangential (slip) velocity at a fluid-solid interface is well understood, the importance and treatment of normal (transpiration) velocity and normal stress is unclear. We show that, when slip velocity varies at an interface above the texture, a non-zero transpiration velocity arises from mass conservation. The ability of a given surface texture to accommodate for a normal velocity of this kind is quantified by a transpiration length. We further demonstrate that normal momentum transfer gives rise to a pressure jump. For a porous material, the pressure jump can be characterised by so called resistance coefficients. By solving five Stokes problems, the introduced measures of slip, transpiration and resistance can be determined for any anisotropic non-smooth surface consisting of regularly repeating geometric patterns. The proposed conditions are a subset of effective boundary conditions derived from formal multi-scale expansion. We validate and demonstrate the physical significance of the effective conditions on two canonical problems -- a lid-driven cavity and a turbulent channel flow, both with non-smooth bottom surfaces.

physics.flu-dyn↗

arXiv2017

Passive control of a falling sphere by elliptic-shaped appendages

The majority of investigations characterizing the motion of single or multiple particles in fluid flows consider canonical body shapes, such as spheres, cylinders, discs, etc. However, protrusions on bodies -- being either as surface imperfections or appendages that serve a function -- are ubiquitous in both nature and applications. In this work, we characterize how the dynamics of a sphere with an axis-symmetric wake is modified in the presence of thin three-dimensional elliptic-shaped protrusions. By investigating a wide range of three-dimensional appendages with different aspect ratios and lengths, we clearly show that the sphere with an appendage may robustly undergo an inverted-pendulum-like (IPL) instability. This means that the position of the appendage placed behind the sphere and aligned with the free-stream direction is unstable, in a similar way that an inverted pendulum is unstable under gravity. Due to this instability, non-trivial forces are generated on the body, leading to turn and drift, if the body is free to fall under gravity. Moreover, we identify the aspect ratio and length of the appendage that induces the largest side force on the sphere, and therefore also the largest drift for a freely falling body. Finally, we explain the physical mechanisms behind these observations in the context of the IPL instability, i.e., the balance between surface area of the appendage exposed to reversed flow in the wake and the surface area of the appendage exposed to fast free-stream flow.

physics.flu-dyn↗

arXiv2017

A computational continuum model of poroelastic beds

Despite the ubiquity of fluid flows interacting with porous and elastic materials, we lack a validated non-empirical macroscale method for characterizing the flow over and through a poroelastic medium. We propose a computational tool to describe such configurations by deriving and validating a continuum model for the poroelastic bed and its interface with the above free fluid. We show that, using stress continuity condition and slip velocity condition at the interface, the effective model captures the effects of small changes in the microstructure anisotropy correctly and predicts the overall behaviour in a physically consistent and controllable manner. Moreover, we show that the performance of the effective model is accurate by validating with fully microscopic resolved simulations. The proposed computational tool can be used in investigations in a wide range of fields, including mechanical engineering, bio-engineering and geophysics.

physics.flu-dyn↗

arXiv2016

A framework for computing effective boundary conditions at the interface between free fluid and a porous medium

Interfacial boundary conditions determined from empirical or ad-hoc models remain the standard approach to model fluid flows over porous media, even in situations where the topology of the porous medium is known. We propose a non-empirical and accurate method to compute the effective boundary conditions at the interface between a porous surface and an overlying flow. Using multiscale expansion (homogenization) approach, we derive a tensorial generalized version of the empirical condition suggested by Beavers & Joseph (1967). The components of the tensors determining the effective slip velocity at the interface are obtained by solving a set of Stokes equations in a small computational domain near the interface containing both free flow and porous medium. Using the lid-driven cavity flow with a porous bed, we demonstrate that the derived boundary condition is accurate and robust by comparing an effective model to direct numerical simulations. Finally, we provide an open source code that solves the microscale problems and computes the velocity boundary condition without free parameters over any porous bed.

physics.flu-dyn↗

arXiv2015

A stable fluid-structure-interaction solver for low-density rigid bodies using the immersed boundary projection method

Dispersion of low-density rigid particles with complex geometries is ubiquitous in both natural and industrial environments. We show that while explicit methods for coupling the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations and Newton's equations of motion are often sufficient to solve for the motion of cylindrical particles with low density ratios, for more complex particles - such as a body with a protrusion - they become unstable. We present an implicit formulation of the coupling between rigid body dynamics and fluid dynamics within the framework of the immersed boundary projection method. Similarly to previous work on this method, the resulting matrix equation in the present approach is solved using a block-LU decomposition. Each step of the block-LU decomposition is modified to incorporate the rigid body dynamics. We show that our method achieves second-order accuracy in space and first-order in time (third-order for practical settings), only with a small additional computational cost to the original method. Our implicit coupling yields stable solution for density ratios as low as $10^{-4}$. We also consider the influence of fictitious fluid located inside the rigid bodies on the accuracy and stability of our method.

physics.comp-ph↗