THIN-FILM FLOW IN HELICAL CHANNELS

Thin-Film Flow in Open Helically-Wound Channels

The study of flow in open helically-wound channels has application to many natural and industrial flows, including those in static spiral separators. The flow consists of a primary axial component and a secondary cross flow and, in spiral separators, the fluid depth is typically small making experimental investigation difficult. Mathematical models are therefore of great value for determining h...

Thin-Film Flow Influenced by Thermal Noise

We study the influence of thermal fluctuations on the dewetting dynamics of thin liquid films. Starting from the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations with thermal noise, we derive a fourth-order degenerate parabolic stochastic partial differential equation which includes a conservative, multiplicative noise term—the stochastic thin-film equation. Technically, we rely on a long-wave-approximat...

Simulations of Surfactant Driven Thin Film Flow

This thesis is intended to fulfill the requirements of the Math and Physics departments at Harvey Mudd College. We begin with a brief introduction to the study of surfactant dynamics followed by some background on the experimental framework our work is related to. We then go through a derivation of the model we use, and explore in depth the nature of the Equation of State (EoS), the relationshi...

Electrified viscous thin film flow over topography

Transverse flow in thin superhydrophobic channels.

We provide some general theoretical results to guide the optimization of transverse hydrodynamic phenomena in superhydrophobic channels. Our focus is on the canonical micro- and nanofluidic geometry of a parallel-plate channel with an arbitrary two-component (low-slip and high-slip) coarse texture, varying on scales larger than the channel thickness. By analyzing rigorous bounds on the permeabi...