• Novel method simulates tens of thousands

    From ScienceDaily@1:317/3 to All on Wed Feb 2 21:30:42 2022
    Novel method simulates tens of thousands of bubbles in foamy flows


    Date:
    February 2, 2022
    Source:
    Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
    Summary:
    Bubbles aren't just for bath time. Bubbles, specifically bubbles in
    foamy flows, are critical for many industrial processes, including
    the production of food and cosmetics and drug development and
    delivery. But the behavior of these foamy flows is notoriously
    difficult to compute because of the sheer number of bubbles
    involved. Previous attempts to simulate foamy flows have relied
    on the time-consuming and computationally expensive process of
    tracking the bubbles by color- coating each individual bubble in
    the foam. This limited simulations to just a few dozen bubbles,
    instead of the thousands to millions in real foams. Now, researchers
    have developed a new way to simulate tens of thousands of bubbles
    in foamy flows, breaking the computational complexity of this
    long-standing process.



    FULL STORY ========================================================================== Bubbles aren't just for bath time. Bubbles, specifically bubbles in
    foamy flows, are critical for many industrial processes, including the production of food and cosmetics and drug development and delivery. But
    the behavior of these foamy flows is notoriously difficult to compute
    because of the sheer number of bubbles involved.


    ========================================================================== Previous attempts to simulate foamy flows have relied on the
    time-consuming and computationally expensive process of tracking the
    bubbles by color-coating each individual bubble in the foam. This limited simulations to just a few dozen bubbles, instead of the thousands to
    millions in real foams.

    Now, researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering
    and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a new way to simulate tens
    of thousands of bubbles in foamy flows, breaking the computational
    complexity of this long- standing process.

    The research is published in Science Advances.

    "This new method allows us for the first time to study foams with
    many bubbles, opening the door for simulating a wide variety of flows
    from the micro to the macroscale, including wet foams, turbulent flows
    with bubbles, suspensions and emulsions in microfluidics," said Petros Koumoutsakos, the Herbert S. Winokur, Jr. Professor of Engineering and
    Applied Sciences at SEAS and senior author of the study.

    Instead of color-coating each individual bubble, the researchers broke
    the foam down into a grid, with each cell of the grid containing at most
    a part of four bubbles. Each bubble inside the cell is color-coated,
    either yellow, green, blue or red.

    "If I have four partial bubbles inside a cell, then the remaining piece
    of the bubbles have to be in the neighboring cells," said Petr Karnakov,
    a graduate student at SEAS and first author of the paper. "We developed
    an algorithm that can go into other cells and find the remaining pieces
    of the bubble, matching green to green, blue to blue, etc. So, instead
    of needing millions of colors, you just need four." This capability
    allows for predictive simulations in scales ranging from microfluidics
    to crashing waves. "Our new approach allows for large-scale predictive simulations of flows with multiple interfaces," said Sergey Litvinov,
    a postdoctoral fellow at ETH Zurich.

    The difference between all previous approaches and the new approach
    developed by Koumoutsakos, Karnakov and Litvinov can be compared to the difference between a painting and a puzzle. A painting is painstakingly
    created stroke by stroke, while a puzzle relies on geometry and matching colors.

    Next, the researchers aim to collaborate with experimentalists and
    industrial partners to see how the method can be applied in the medical
    field and the food industry as well as for membrane-less electrolysis
    for energy applications.

    The research was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation under
    grant CRSII5_17386.

    ========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by Harvard_John_A._Paulson_School_of_Engineering_and_Applied
    Sciences. Original written by Leah Burrows. Note: Content may be edited
    for style and length.


    ========================================================================== Journal Reference:
    1. Petr Karnakov, Sergey Litvinov, Petros Koumoutsakos. Computing
    foaming
    flows across scales: From breaking waves to microfluidics. Science
    Advances, 2022; 8 (5) DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abm0590 ==========================================================================

    Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/02/220202143045.htm

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