Speaker
Description
Multiphase flows are ubiquitous in both engineering applications and the environment. Within the energy sector, such flows play fundamental roles in chemical transformation reactors, spray combustors, and slurry pipelines, to name just a few examples. Understanding and predicting such flows is key to ensuring optimal performance and improving design. Environmental processes such as gravity currents, hurricanes, debris flows, and atmospheric dispersion of pollutant particles also represent multiphase flows with great societal importance. Improving our understanding of these flows is critical to develop strategies to control them and mitigate their negative effects. The key challenge is attributed to the wide range of length- and time-scales inherent to these flows, which typically vary by many orders of magnitude. The advent of modern computing has led to significant progress in numerical modeling of multiphase flows, yet simulation capabilities at practical engineering and environmental scales still remain out of reach. In this talk, I will highlight the current state-of-the-art in numerical simulations of turbulent multiphase flows and highlight the key limitations and challenges. I will argue that model development and new insights into these complex flows are hindered by the availability of diverse large-scale datasets. Fast and open-source access to turbulent multiphase flow data would enable the scientific community to probe flow physics, test new models, and quantify uncertainty across different modeling approaches. The Johns Hopkins Turbulence Database is widely considered the 'go to' source for large-scale turbulence data. Meanwhile, an open-source database of canonical multiphase flows does not exist. The talk will conclude with a pithy description of what such a database might look like, and its potential impact.
