Oct 2023
Abstract
Unsteady fragmentation of fluids into droplets is ubiquitous in industrial, energy, environmental, and health-related processes. Despite the complexity and diversity of modes of unsteady fluid fragmentation into droplets, universality across geometry and fluid systems emerges. We present our joint experimental and theoretical work and discuss the development toward a general description of unsteady fragmentation. We show how changing the frame of reference to account for non-inertial effects and to disentangle the nonlinear dynamics involved enabled us to elucidate how unsteadiness governs the impulsive breakup of a drop upon impact, and how the skewness of the distributions of final spray droplet sizes and speeds is selected.
Bio
Prof. Bourouiba founded and directs The Fluid Dynamics of Disease Transmission Laboratory and the Fluids and Health Network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research interests and activities span a broad range of applied mathematics approaches and curiosity driven fluid dynamic experiments at various scales. She has worked and combined experiments, theory, and numerics on various fluid dynamics problems from turbulence to interfacial flows and her recent work elucidated multi-scale dynamics of unsteady fluid fragmentation, droplet and bubble dynamics, and complex and multiphase flows with particular interest in coupled physics and biology problems driving mixing, transport, persistence, and adaptation of interfaces and organisms, or contamination relevant for health, environmental, and industrial processes. Prof. Bourouiba is the recipient of many awards and recognitions, including the Tse Cheuk Ng Tai’s Prize for Innovative Research in Health Sciences, the Ole Madsen Mentoring Award, the Smith Family Foundation Odyssey Award for high-risk/high-reward basic science research. She was elected fellow of the American Physical Society in 2021 and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in 2022. More here https://lbourouiba.mit.edu/contact.