CaSToRC, the HPC National Competence Centre,
invites you to the SimEA Online Seminar Series

About the SimEA project Seminar Series

The SimEA project Seminar Series aims at promoting and disseminating scientific knowledge, focusing on Computational Science and Engineering, by featuring prominent researchers from around the world presenting their views and addressing key questions. 

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 810660.

Abstract

Moving droplets on surfaces is an ubiquitous phenomenon in the natural world, which also finds application in a broad spectrum of technologies. Yet, their study is inherently complex and many of these applications are being developed based on intuition derived from laboratory observations. This complexity stems from the multiscale nature of the phenomenon, from forces that manifest themselves at the macro-scale, such as gravity and capillarity, to the micro-scale effects close to the droplet front. Although impressive progress in contact line phenomena and the broader field of wetting hydrodynamics has been made in recent decades, there are several open questions that still elude us, including the poorly understood dynamics on surfaces that contain small-scale heterogeneous features.

The talk will give an overview of the challenges in modelling and simulating such flows, as well as present some recent work in the development of a general asymptotic framework that aims to deduce lower-dimensional models that describe the evolution of droplets on surfaces, by bridging the macro- and micro-scale features of the flow. In addition, some preliminary results towards the development of data-driven surrogate models are also presented. Both approaches are shown to adequately capture the dynamics within their domain of applicability, offering new directions and opportunities towards improving our fundamental understanding of this class of phenomena, as well as for informing strategies for controlling and manipulating droplet behaviour in the aforementioned applications and beyond.

About the Speaker

Dr Savva is currently an Assistant Professor at The Cyprus Institute and is part of the SimEA ERA Chair group led by Prof. Vangelis Harmandaris. He holds a PhD in Applied Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BSc in Applied Mathematics Engineering and Physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to joining CyI he held a tenured lectureship at the School of Mathematics at Cardiff University, having being previously a post-doctoral research associate at the Chemical Engineering Department of Imperial College London and a visiting scholar at Université Libre de Bruxelles.

His research interests lie at the interface between applied mathematics and theoretical engineering, with particular focus on multiscale flows pertaining to wetting hydrodynamics. Much of his work to date combines analytical and computational approaches in order to elucidate the influence of substrate heterogeneities and other complexities on contact line dynamics, and how these may be used in controlling the actuation of droplets in applications. Through his participation in the Centre of Excellence RAISE, he is currently involved in exploring the use of data-driven methodologies for developing surrogate models that may be used in expediting the simulation of wetting phenomena. The CoE RAISE project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 – Research and Innovation Framework Programme H2020-INFRAEDI-2019-1 under grant agreement no. 951733

Download the Winter-Spring 2022 Online EuroCC & SimEA Seminar Series Programme here.

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