Event

In this talk, I provide a glimpse into fluid mechanics and soft-condensed matter flow problems that we have studied in recent years.  In particular, I will first describe experiments of the drainage of a liquid film on a vertical substrate of finite width to motivate a similarity solution involving three independent variables, which is then rationalized with a nonlinear theory.  Second, I will discuss an evaporation problem involving N droplets, and show how a 19th-century approach appears to be more effective than modern (mostly numerical) studies of the problem. Finally,  I will discuss the hydrodynamic interactions between sedimenting spherical particles and a nearby corrugated surfaces, whose corrugations are tilted with respect to gravity. Our experiments show three-dimensional, helical particle trajectories with an overall drift along the corrugations, which agree quantitatively with our analytical perturbation theory. The effect of random surfaces will also be mentioned as an open question.