Flow dynamics in a diseased human artery
The research deals with understanding the flow dynamics in normal and diseased coronary artery, the disease affecting millions of people, and the leading cause of death in the United States. The PI’s long term plans are to use her unique expertise in large-scale-simulations and fluid dynamics to develop novel bio-engineering tools to simulate blood-flow in a diseased coronary artery. This approach will be a vital step towards interdisciplinary bio-engineering/clinical efforts to achieve breakthrough in detection, diagnosis, and treatment of coronary artery disease. The proposal aims at establishing the criteria for the characterization of the coronary artery. Based on theoretical understanding of turbulent flows, a set of metrics will be identified to differentiate a normal from a diseased artery. The outcome of this pilot proposal is well-defined metrics for coronary artery characterization, and these metrics will be the basis too begin detailed investigation of the coronary artery disease using large-scale realistic simulations.
Flow dynamics application in oceanography
An ongoing work to understand the hydrodynamics of interaction of current and waves on a rough sea-bed is being performed. The next part of the study will focus on the integration of DNS with multiphase sediment model is planned in the near future. This will be the first time to accurately capture the hydrodynamics and be able to (a) provide accurate closure parameters for turbulence modeling (b) accurate prediction of sediment transport, (c) detailed understanding of the fundamental processes in the ocean. It will be an important milestone in our understanding of Oceanic hydrodynamics as well as sediment transport analysis.
Fundamental studies in Turbulent flows
Surface roughness is a defining feature of many of the high Reynolds-numbers flows found in engineering. In fact, the higher the Reynolds number (Re), the more likely the effects of roughness are significant, since the size of the roughness elements becomes increasingly large compared to the near-surface viscous length appropriate for smooth-wall flows. As a result, turbulent boundary layers over the hulls of ships and submarines, within turbo-machinery, and over the surface of the earth are all cases to which the smooth-wall idealization rarely applies. Unfortunately the impact of surface roughness is not entirely understood, and a number of important fundamental questions have not yet received a satisfactory answer.
Development of DNS tools
DNS is a state-of-art methodology to simulate turbulence flow without any apriori approximations and assumptions. To-date, there are only handful of DNS solvers to simulate flow over complex boundary. With the advances in computing, numerical algorithms, it is becoming feasible to use DNS as a tool for real life problems (high Reynolds numbers, complex geometry, unsteady flow conditions)