Achievement

IGERT Fellow Farid Harhad has conducted novel flow visualization work on flows related to stirred tanks, which are the most commonly used mixing devices in the chemical industry. As part of ongoing visualization efforts, a team of computer scientists and mechanical engineers implemented time surfaces, such as an evolving surface of a sphere to analyze the flow field. The integration of a surface over time generates an evolving surface that illustrates key flow characteristics such as how matter injected in a stirred tank disperses. Because of the highly turbulent nature of the flow, complicated topological changes arise frequently. In this ongoing work, he has implemented an advanced surface refinement algorithm to address the occurrence of such events. Also, the CFD team has identified mixing criteria to quantify the quality of mixing such as rate of change of the surface area and volume of the blob. We are now incorporating such attribute calculations in our algorithm.