Fluid-fluid interfaces play a dominant role in the behaviour of many industrial processes, in particular those that involve the coating (wetting) or separation (de-wetting) of solids. Examples of such processes include the extraction of bitumen from the tar sands, fabrication by ink-jet printing, drug delivery from micro- and nano-capsules, production of food such as ice cream and the stabilization of foams and emulsions.
The Interfacial Flow Laboratory is dedicated to the development of multiphase algorithms for laboratory scale simulation of multiphase flows. Such phenomena include, but are not limited to, contact angle dynamics, particulate flows, surface tension dominated flows, Marigoni flows and many others. Several computational codes have been developed for modelling such phenomena using accurate state of the art interface advection schemes and surface tension models primarily based on Volume-of-Fluid (VOF) formulations.
Additionally, the group focuses on applied areas such as modelling the production of paper/pulp, steam soot blowers, bitumen extraction and other industrial processes using available commercial and open source Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software. The group has several industrial and academic collaborators.