HEDH Webinar Series

Prashant Valluri The University  of Edinburgh

Professor Prashant Valluri received his PhD (2004) in Chemical Engineering from Imperial College London. His research focuses on tackling industrial multiphase flows with phase-change using bespoke numerical and theoretical techniques. These include stability analyses to understand interfacial instabilities, and DNS for combined heat-mass-momentum transport such as flows with phase change, and flows with mass-transfer and interfacial reactions. He is a Professor of Fluid Dynamics and Director of Chemical Engineering at The University of Edinburgh. He is also Chair of the UK-wide Multiphase Flows and Transport Phenomena Special Interest Group under the UK Fluids Network. He leads development of the ultra-fast high resolution TPLS (Two-Phase Level-Set: https://sourceforge.net/projects/tpls/) and the GIS 1.0 (Gerris Immersed Solid Solver: https://github.com/eessmann/GISS) solvers. These solvers are being employed to gain understanding of fundamental phenomena during phase-change cooling for applications including thermal management of microelectronics, industrial scale boiling applications and most recently spray cooling. He is the Coordinator and the PI of the recently concluded five-continent ThermaSMART project (funded by the European Commission) with 20 other major international participants including 4 industrial partners. Recently, he received an EPSRC-ARCHER2 Pioneer Computational Award e643 for Project STALWART: Speedy IndusTrial ScAle MuLtiphase FloW SimulAtions for EngineeRing Energy Efficient EquipmenT.

What if my coolant is a bit too drunk?

February 07, 2024 (1pm UK time)

Number of views:

433

Coolants are pretty important. More so when they undergo phase-change via droplet evaporation or boiling, because that way they can cool faster and better. Evaporation and boiling, while common, are pretty complex! Especially, when contaminated by alcohol or anything more volatile. Further, in industry and in real life – droplets are never alone, they are in large populations. Both populations and alcohol can have consequences on drying in multiple droplet populations. In this talk – I will focus on phase-change of binary mixtures. I will demonstrate the three-pronged approach (theory, experiment, and direct numerical simulations) to unravel the physics. I will use boiling as example to show how very large scale direct numerical simulations can mimic industry scale surfaces and therefore enable us to understand the role of wettability on heat-transfer coefficients. I will also show how particles in phase-change systems can cause chaos and remixing!