pps proceeding - Abstract Preview
pps proceeding
Symposium: S04 - Modeling and Simulation
Oral Presentation
 
 

Prediction of Droplet Dynamics under Confined Flows by Coarse-grain Tunable Dissipative Particle Dynamics

Boromand Arman (1)*, Maia Joao (1)

(1) Case Western Reserve University - OH - USA

Using complex fluids such as colloids and polymeric liquids and/or melts in highly confined conditions has become relatively common due to the steady growth in microfluidic technology and novel processing techniques. In this work, we capture the effect of confinement on the kinetics and dynamic of multiphasic fluids. Due to the multiscale phenomena involved in multiphase flows, i.e., droplet dynamics, instabilities and interfacial phenomena on one hand, and difficulty of performing experimental studies under confined situation on the other, there is a steadily growing interest to tackle this problem through computational studies. We use Dissipative Particle Dynamics (DPD) as a mesoscale computational technique to study droplet dynamics under confinement. DPD is capable of capturing microscopic phenomena and provide comparison to macroscopic simulations and experiments much faster compare to common microscale computational techniques e.g. Molecular Dynamics (MD). In particular, we focus on the interplay between droplet size and stress level in shear flows in bulk and confined geometries. For this purpose, a Newtonian droplet in a Newtonian matrix system is modeled, in order to ignore any complexity of materials and solely study the effect of geometry. Droplet dynamics in these cases is compared to macroscopic models and experimental results to confirm validity of this mesoscopic simulation method. In addition, the dependency of surface tension on droplet size is addressed and its effect on nanoscopic droplets’ dynamics will be discussed.