AEM Seminar: Particle-induced transition in interfacial dynamics
Sungyon Lee, Benjamin Mayhugh Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering, University of Minnesota
2:30 PM on 2017-11-10
In this talk, we will focus on two complementary flow configurations in which the presence of suspended particles may drastically alter the dynamics of the fluid-fluid interface. First, we report a particle-induced fingering instability when a mixture of particles and viscous oil is injected radially into an air-filled Hele-Shaw cell. Our experimental results show that the onset and characteristics of fingering are most directly affected by the particle volume fraction but also depend on the ratio of the particle diameter to gap size. The physical mechanism and reduced model will also be discussed. In the second part of the talk, we discuss the result of injecting air into a packing of soft hydrogel beads that are saturated in water. We find that this new combination of buoyancy, capillarity, and elasticity under confinement leads to complex morphologies of air migration, as well as nontrivial dynamics in the amount of trapped air in the system.
Bio:
Sungyon Lee is a Benjamin Mayhugh Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Minnesota. She completed her Ph.D. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and B.S. in Mechanical Engineering at University of California, Berkeley. Following a post-doc at Ecole Polytechnique and adjunct faculty position in Applied Math at University of California, Los Angeles, she was an assistant professor in the Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University from 2013-2017. Dr. Lee's fluid mechanics research group specializes in reducing complex physical phenomena into tractable problems that can be visualized with table-top experiments and solved with mathematical modeling. The physical systems of interest range from drops and bubbles, particle-laden flows, to two-phase flows through porous media and are strongly motivated by applications in the area of energy and environment.