When does a bubble split around an obstacle?
Study bubble deformation, bypassing, and splitting around a cylinder or fiber, including the intervening liquid film.
LBM · Research project ideas
A question to
make your own.
Explore specific project ideas within our research directions.
Each idea is a starting point. Together we will define a focused question, check the relevant literature, and choose a scope that fits your background and computing resources.
Droplets, bubbles and interfaces
Controlling droplets with patterned surfaces
Investigate how surface patterns influence pinning, depinning, and droplet motion.
Droplet impact on a layered liquid pool
Examine how a floating liquid layer changes crater formation, interface deformation, and jet emergence.
What controls the breakup of an immiscible jet?
Study how inertia, viscosity, and surface tension influence breakup length and droplet formation.
How confinement changes rising bubbles
Investigate bubble shape and rise speed in pipes and annular passages.
Moving droplets and bubbles with temperature gradients
Study thermocapillary migration and the influence of confinement and surface-tension response.
How surfactants reshape flow inside droplets
Examine how surfactant transport and thermal stresses interact to change internal circulation.
Can bubble curtains contain a pollutant?
Investigate how bubble injection and curtain arrangement affect pollutant containment and leakage.
Resolving heat transfer around a growing bubble
Assess thermal coupling and interface-resolution effects in a carefully scoped single-bubble problem.
Flow through porous materials
Designing fibrous filters that capture and merge droplets
Examine how fiber arrangement and wettability affect droplet capture, coalescence, and release.
Mobilizing trapped fluids in porous media
Study how pore geometry, wettability, and an injected third fluid influence displacement and trapping.
Which model should we trust?
Which multiphase model should we use—and when?
Compare selected formulations using common benchmarks and quantitative measures of accuracy, conservation, stability, and cost.
Choosing collision kernels for reliable simulations
Investigate how collision models affect numerical dissipation, accuracy, and robustness.
Can interface geometry be calculated locally?
Assess interface gradients and normals reconstructed from population moments, including where corrections are needed.
Combining LBM with a finite-volume interface solver
Compare coupling strategies for consistent mass and momentum transport.
Accurate flows around curved boundaries
Quantify how wall treatments affect forces, near-wall flow, and convergence.
More physics per byte
How much numerical precision does LBM really need?
Assess reduced and mixed precision, round-off mitigation, and the tradeoff between precision, resolution, memory, and runtime.
Faster LBM at the same accuracy
Investigate GPU implementation, memory-efficient schemes, or grid refinement using cost at a specified accuracy.
Unsteady flows and turbulence
Predicting the onset of vortex shedding
Identify wake transitions and instability growth while separating physical behavior from numerical effects.
How reliable are under-resolved turbulent simulations?
Assess how collision and stabilization choices affect dissipation and flow statistics on limited grids.
Choosing a manageable project
Students are expected to provide their own computing hardware. Three-dimensional breakup, thermal multiphase flows, and turbulence can be demanding; the initial test case and resolution will be chosen accordingly.