Berkeley Fluids Seminar

Modeling Electrolytes at the Mesoscale

Monday, March 18, 2019

12:00-13:00, 3110 Etcheverry Hall

Dr. John Bell

(Center for Computational Science and Engineering)

(Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)

Abstract: At small scales, the standard deterministic equations used for modeling fluids break down and thermal fluctuations play an important role in the dynamics. Landau and Lifshitz proposed a modified version of the Navier-Stokes equations, referred to as the fluctuating hydrodynamics equations that incorporate stochastic flux terms designed to incorporate the effect of fluctuations. These stochastic fluxes are constructed so that the equations are consistent with equilibrium fluctuations from statistical mechanics. In this talk, we present a generalization of fluctuating hydrodynamics to electrolytes. We then discuss some of the properties of the resulting system and show how fluctuations naturally incorporate some of the distinguishing characteristics of electrolytes. We then introduce a finite-volume method for solving the fluctuating hydrodynamics equations and present numerical results illustrating the behavior of electrolytes in some canonical flows.

Bio: John Bell is a Senior Staff Mathematician at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Chief Scientist of Berkeley Lab's Computational Research Division. His research focuses on the development and analysis of numerical methods for partial differential equations arising in science and engineering. He has made contributions in the areas of finite volume methods, numerical methods for low Mach number flows, adaptive mesh refinement, stochastic differential equations, interface tracking and parallel computing. He has also worked on the application of these numerical methods to problems from a broad range of fields, including combustion, shock physics, seismology, atmospheric flows, flow in porous media, mesoscale fluid modeling and astrophysics. He is a Fellow of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Acknowledgments

Prof. Eliot Quataert on behalf of The Theoretical Astrophysics Center and the Astronomy Department (UC Berkeley)

Prof. Philip S. Marcus on behalf of the Mechanical Engineering Department (UC Berkeley)

Prof. Michael Manga (Earth and Planetary Science, UC Berkeley)

Prof. Evan Variano (Civil and Environmental Engineering, UC Berkeley)