Bio: Anthony Wachs is an assistant professor with a joint appointment in the departments of Mathematics and of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. He received his B. Sc. and M. Sc. from the University Louis Pasteur of Strasbourg and his PhD from the Institut National Polytechnique of Grenoble in 2000. Right after, he was hired in 2001 as a Fluid Mechanics research engineer at IFP Energies nouvelles (IFPEN, at that time Institut Français du Pétrole) in Paris.
In 2009, he spent a one-year sabbatical at the nuclear research center of Cadarache in the south of France, where he worked for IRSN (the french national safety administration for nuclear energy). In 2010, he got his HDR (French Habilitation to Supervise Research) and was later promoted Scientific Advisor at IFPEN in Multiphase Flows and Scientific Computing. He then moved to IFPEN-Lyon where he supervised a group of researchers (including PhD and post-doc students) on the numerical simulation of reactive particulate flows (www.peligriff.com).
His main research interests are non-Newtonian Flows, Multiphase Flows and High Performance Computing. He collaborates extensively with academic groups in Canada, Brazil, France and Germany.
Micro/meso numerical modeling of flows laden with particles of arbitrary shape
Particulate flows are ubiquitous in environmental, geophysical and engineering processes. The intricate dynamics of these two-phase flows is governed by momentum transfer between the continuous fluid phase and the dispersed particulate phase. When significant temperature differences exist between the fluid and particles and/or chemical reactions take place at the fluid/particle interfaces, the phases also exchange heat and/or mass, respectively. While some multi-phase processes may be successfully modelled at the continuum scale through closure approximations, an increasing number of applications require resolution across scales, e.g. dense suspensions, fluidized beds. Within a multi-scale micro/meso/macro-framework, we develop robust numerical models at the micro and meso scales, based on a Distributed Lagrange Multiplier/Fictitious Domain method and a two-way Euler/Lagrange method, respectively. Collisions between finite size particles are modeled with a Discrete Element Method. Many real-life processes and/or flows involve non-spherical particles. Although there is still a lot to learn about flows laden with spherical particles, there is also a strong incentive to develop new modeling tools to account for non-spherical, angular, convex or even non-convex particles. We discuss assorted issues related to the numerical modelling of flows laden with particles of arbitrary shape. Along the way, we also address high performance computing issues related to our massively parallel numerical tools and challenges to efficiently transfer knowledge from small scales to large scales. We illustrate the modelling capabilities of our tools on the two following problems relevant of applications from the chemical engineering and process industry: (i) a rotating drum filled with non-convex particles and (ii) fixed and fluidized beds of multilobic (and hence non-convex) particles.
This seminar is co-organized with the Applied Interdisciplinary Mathematics program
