Team Members
Jérôme Duplat (Assistant Professor, Université de Provence), Nicolas Vandenberghe (Assistant Professor, Université de Provence), Romain Vermorel (PhD Student, Université de Provence), Emmanuel Villermaux (Professor, Université de Provence and Institut Universitaire de France).
Past Members
Arnaud Antkowiak (Now at IJLRDA, Paris), Benjamin Bossa, Nicolas Brémond (Now at LCMD, ESPCI Paris), Claudia Innocenti (Now at the Department of Physics, University of Florence), Phillippe Marmottant (Now at the LSP, CNRS Grenoble),
Research Projects
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| A blob of ink stirred in glycerol |
We develop a broad program aiming at understanding the principles of matter division in various contexts such as scalar mixing, aging in foams, liquid atomization and the formation of sprays, or solid fragmentation under impact. This will help discovering the possible analogies between these apparently disjointed fields. For instance: do the cells coalescing into each other in a foam give rise to cell sizes distributions identical to the drops sizes distributions in a spray, to the fragment sizes in a broken solid? Are there common principles?
For each of these particular topics, we want to establish the connection between global statistics (i.e. concentration levels, drops sizes, fragment sizes), and the microscopic effects giving birth to them.
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| Atomization of a liquid jet |
This activity is at the cross roads of several currently active area of research in complex systems namely
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| Fragmentation of a sugar cube |
- Mixing in disordered/turbulent flows
- Chemotaxis in complex or/and time-varying environments
- Free surface flows and sprays
- Aging in non-equilibrium systems
- The mechanics of rupture and fracture
Primarily of a heuristic nature, these works have a strong bearing on various applications in geophysics and biology for mixing, liquid propulsion for sprays, security and protection for impact fragmentation.
Credits
E. V. is a member of the Institut Universitaire de France. A. A. is supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the EADS foundation. R. V. is supported by the Délégation Générale à l'Armement. The team is supported by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche and the CNRS through the INCA project.