French
English
Microfluidics has become an important field of research due to its applicability to mix, separate and sort particles/cells in complex fluids/mixtures and its potential in many areas, such as biological assays, lab on a chip devices and disease diagnosis. However, those fluids and mixtures exhibit significant inter and intra molecular interactions that affect their macroscopic behaviour. With an increased need for earlier disease detection, improved medical equipment, and enhanced clinical treatments, and a lack in fundamental understanding of the physical phenomena at the micro-scale due to nonequilibrium fluctuations arising from the size reduction of microfluidic devices, the scope for numerical methods is large. This talk will present the development and application of a high-order multi-component Lattice Boltzmann (LB) model. Expanding LB models to higher orders makes it possible to solve nonequilibrium flow quantities and fully recover the Navier-Stokes solution. Challenges in developing, validating and applying such high-order multi-component models will be discussed. Following, Coarse-Grained Molecular Dynamics will be highlighted for soft matters in the perspective of coupling the approach with LB. The presented approach is a step towards an efficient, robust and accurate numerical method for simulating microfluidic flows capable to unveil new physics and provide detailed description and understanding of complex physical transport phenomena that can pave the way to future advancements in microfluidics.
Dr. Emilie Sauret is a Professor in the School of Mechanical, Medical and Process Engineering, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia, and an elected council member of the Australasian Fluid Mechanics Society. She received a PhD in Turbulence Modelling from Pierre & Marie Curie University, Paris, France in 2004. Following some time in industry, she was awarded competitive Australian Research Council Fellowships, a DECRA in 2013 and a Future Fellowship in 2020. Dr. Sauret has extensive interdisciplinary research experience at the crossroads between mechanical engineering, applied mathematics, and applied physics. She specialised in developing advanced computational models to understand complex fluid phenomena for a variety of engineering applications.