Undergraduate Summer Research Project

Title: Numerical Simulation of Sessile Droplets Heated from Below

Supervisor: Associate Professor Lennon Ó Náraigh, UCD School of Mathematics and Statistics

The project will last 2 months. Details of the exact start date can be negotiated with the supervisor. A stipend of 750 EUR per month will be funded by the SFI Centre for Research Training in Foundations of Data Science.

Closing date for applications is 14 April 2022. Applicants should send a cover letter (max 1 page) and CV (max 2 pages) as a single PDF file to (opens in a new window)miguel.bustamante@ucd.ie

Details of the Research Project:

Sessile droplets are droplets deposited on a substrate. We look at a scenario where such droplets are heated from below with a single isolated heat source.  In this case, experiments have confirmed that such localized heating induces Marangoni currents in the droplet; furthermore, the Marangoni convection can become unstable via secondary instability for sufficiently large heat fluxes.  In this work, we will reproduce these experimental results via numerical simulation. The numerical code exists already - it is a 3D incompressible multiphase flow solver. The aim of the project will be to validate the code and run the numerical simulations, with a view to determining the critical parameters for (i) the onset of convection and (ii) the onset of the secondary instability.

This is joint work with the University of Edinburgh (UK) and the University of Kyushu (Japan), and as well as being a fascinating theoretical problem, it has many practical applications in industrial cooling and phase change.