Sharif Digital Repository

Ferrofluids are used in various fields such as drug delivery systems, heat transfer, biotechnology and separation processes. In this study, the splitting of ferrofluid microdroplets in symmetric and asymmetric T-junctions in the presence of a magnetic field has been investigated numerically and experimentally. These studies have shown that the creation of an asymmetric magnetic field can either affect the phenomenon of ferrofluid microdroplet breakup or the volume of microdroplets that are created after breaking and leaving each branch. Furthermore, more control can be applied to the phenomenon of microdroplet breakup. In the numerical study, the ferrofluid microdroplet breakup at different... 

The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has driven our attention to a simulation of virus dispersion to complete our understanding of airborne transmission. A myriad of studies have shown that respiratory diseases such as MERS, SARS, and COVID-19 can be transmitted by virus-laden droplets released during coughs, sneezing, and normal breathing. To mitigate and prevent the spread of such infectious diseases, investigation of the transmission routes is of great importance. This study has been fueled to harness the CFD tool to simulate the virus-laden droplets dispersion in hospitals inwards. Because of the limitations intertwined with experimental works such as the risk of infection of experimenters, and... 

The electrohydrodynamic (EHD) 3D printing technology is an Additive Manufacturing (AM) method that can be used in the manufacture of submicron-size structures. Due to the multiphysics dynamics and the multiphase nature of the microdroplet formation in the EHD printers, modeling of this phenomenon is complicated. In this thesis, the formation of a droplet in an EHD printer—under a pulsed electrical field—is simulated using a new numerical model which couples the fluid flow, the electric field distribution and the movement of the electric charges under dynamic and transient conditions. The level-set method is applied to the entire multiphysics domain in order to study the formation of the... 

Droplet-based microfluidics offers a promising tool in engineering and biomedicine such as drug delivery, biochemistry, sample handling in lab-on-a-chip devices, and tissue engineering. These systems provide the droplets manipulation that can be used as reactors without any contamination for medical purposes. Utilizing magnetic force and ferrofluid droplets can help to better control over the droplet formation and manipulation. Considering the importance of this issue and its rich underlying physics, in this dissertation, ferrofluid droplets formation under a time-dependent, non-uniform magnetic field is studied. A Pulse-Width-Modulation signal (PWM) is utilized to apply the time-dependent... 

Improving the discharge process of phase-change materials (PCMs) is of great importance. In this study, the process of acetone drop impact on molten paraffin, as a direct-contact solidification method, is experimentally investigated. Four Weber numbers (corresponding to heights of 10, 20, 30, and 40 cm) for the acetone drop and six surface temperatures (66, 68, 70, 75, 80, and 90 °C) for the molten paraffin are considered. As the acetone drop impacts the molten paraffin, the drop absorbs heat from the melting paraffin and boils, solidifying a portion of the molten paraffin. Two important parameters that govern the acetone drop dynamics and the solidification of the molten paraffin are the... 

Polymerase chain reaction, abbreviated as PCR, is a method of amplifying the number of copies of a desired DNA sequence through special protocols. The rapid advance of microfluidic devices and the emerging concept of digital microfluidics has resulted into the development of digital droplet PCR (ddPCR) systems with their significant uses in the detection of rare mutations, cancer diagnosis, and surveillance. A large number of micron-sized droplets are required to perform ddPCR. in this study, To investigate the gradient of confinements induced droplet self-breakup mechanism, we carried out the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations for the two-phase flow using a commercial software... 

Surface Active Agents/surfactant have a strong tendency to adsorb at the interface between two immiscible fluids, due to the existence of hydrophobic portions in their molecules’ structure. Accumulation of these molecules on the liquid interface changes the intermolecular forces and causes the interfacial tension to decrease. Production of drops of the same size at a specified rate and controlling their movement’s speed are among the most important factors effective in the efficiency of processes associated with liquid drops, which could profoundly be influenced by the presence of a small amount of a surface active agent. In this study, the effects of surface active agents on the growth,... 

In this research, numerical simulation of the impact of a drop on a flat surface with oblique velocity has been performed, using two-phase model of Lattice Boltzmann Method (conservative phase-field). During impact, it is important to investigate two-dimensional drop dynamics and to evaluate the effectiveness of the numerical method used. The model used here restores conservative phase field and preserves mass both locally and globally. In addition, to calculate the slope of the phase field, it calls the center points without engaging finite difference calculations. This makes it efficient for running parallel computations. A fixed dry and hard surface is considered and the drop impacts it... 

When a liquid drop impacts on a hot non-flat surface the curvature of the surface and its geometrical characteristics transmute the physical regimes and their boundary compared to a flat surface impact. The present experimental study is focused on water drop impingement on the mimetic solid semi-cylindrical convex and concave hot surfaces. The thermal versus inertia map of generated regimes is obtained, while some well-known regimes associated with a flat surface are not observed for the present non-flat impacts. The maximum spreading of the droplet is measured at different surface temperatures and impact Weber numbers for the case of droplet impingement on the convex surface. In directrix... 

In this research, the characteristics of non-Newtonian, shear-thinning drop formation containing surfactant from a needle are investigated experimentally. The ambient fluid is air and all experiments have been conducted in a constant flow rate of drop phase fluid. Images of forming drop are taken using a high-speed camera and by processing them, important parameters in drop formation such as length of drop, minimum neck thickness, formation time and the size of satellite drops have been studied. Three non-Newtonian and three Newtonian fluids are considered in a way that the initial viscosity of non-Newtonian fluids would be equal to the viscosity of their corresponding Newtonian fluids.... 

The liquid breakup analysis and spray characteristics measurement of atomizers are very essential for the numerical modeling of the primary atomization in combustion chambers. The rotary atomizers are used in many applications especially in small gas turbine engines as a fuel injection system. An experimental investigation of primary breakup dynamics and spray characteristics of rotary atomizers with high aspect ratio discharge channels are described. Four different rotary atomizers with round radial, round radial-axial, round radial tangential, and square radial discharge channels are studied. The purposes of this study are to identify the effect of channel orientation and its geometry on... 

Microfluidics with the ability to control Nano-to-Pico meter volumes have caused the revolution in the systems of analytical biology and chemistry. However, the most Lab-On-Chip technologies (LOCs) depend on external control elements, so a lab is required to operate a chip. Bubble or drop logic through the bubble (drop) can control the flow internally and intrinsically digitally without utilizing of off-chip or moving components. Non-linearity is applied by using mutual drop-drop' effects on reversible linear flow in low Reynolds. for the proper exploitation of microfluidic systems, It is necessary to control droplet generation systems in one chip appropriately. The most crucial part of the... 

One of the key features of multiphase flow applications is the creation of as little liquid droplets as possible. For example, it is important to use combustion to burn liquid fuels in combustion chambers, fuel-air mixing and complete evaporation of fuel. Liquid fuel should be converted into small droplets and then mixed with air quickly and evaporated. This challenge has been investigated using injectors of various designs and is still being investigated. One of the injectors used is injectors where both gas and liquid are injected into the injector and supplemented with each other. These injectors are referred to as focal injectors, in which gas flows through a typical orifice to... 

In the present work we first introduced ILIDS and review the theory of interferometry and light scattering from droplets. Bases on ILIDS method, droplets are irradiated by monochrome sheet laser, where the superposition of reflected and first-order refracted beams form a parallel fringe pattern at out of focus plane on the imaging sensor in the forward-scatter region. This pattern can be related to the droplet size by using simple geometrical optics. For the present work, an image processing algorithm is utilized to capture weak and noisy images of droplets to reduce the lost data in the sizing procedure. Since ILIDS method is applied for small and dilute spray, it is suitable for... 

Ice accretion may cause malfunction or serious performance degradation in outdoor facilities and structures, such as aircraft, ship, locks and dams, offshore platforms, solar panels, wind turbines, power transmission towers and lines, and sports facilities, leading to huge economic loss or even loss of human lives. Icephobic materials, typically applied in the form of coatings, have received growing attention in the last decade. This work focuses on surfaces with a surface tension gradient which has icephobic properties. various surface tension gradients such as linear, exponential, cycloid and parabola have been imposed on a surface in order to achieve the shortest time for a droplet to... 

Micropumps are regarded as one of the devices used in microsystems, which are responsible for pumping working fluid. The Mercury Magneto Reciprocating (MMR) micropump, which has been introduced for less than a decade, is an innovative kind of micropumps which the pumping agent includes three liquid metal droplets (LMD) placed inside lateral chambers and reciprocated by the electromagnetic force inside the chambers. The working fluid located inside the main channel is pumped through due to the movement of these three LMDs. The equations governing this micropump are complex and their numerical solution is a time-consuming process, due to electromagnetic, hydrodynamic, and unsteady effects. The... 

In this research, two important mechanisms were discussed including droplet generation and jumping mechanisms using electro wetting-on-dielectric. For these purposes, the finite element method (FEM) was used to solve the unsteady Naiver-Stokes equation. In addition, the level set method was applied to capture the interface between two phases. In the current study, first, droplet generation in a T-junction fluidic channel device was studied through using electro wetting actuation. The efficacy of electro wetting on the droplet generation frequency as well as droplet diameter is visible in a T-junction fluidic channel since after applying voltages, specified with non-dimensional electro... 

Nematic liquid crystal shells (droplets) containing cores have attracted considerable attention in recent years. Defect structures that form in such systems do not emerge in the bulk.These shells which could be created using double emulsion techniques in the laboratory have provided applications in microscale optical structures.In the past just boundary conditions and bulk parameters were noticed but recently the geometry of the core is considered likewise.In this work oblate ellipsoid cores are examined numerically using finite-element method. The boundary conditions in studied systems are perpendicular in outer surface of droplet and planar in the vicinity of the core. First by minimizing... 

Spray-wall impingement is one of the phenomenon that associated in different subject such as spray cooling, combustion chamber and gas turbine. With the impingement of spray to the wall, liquid film begins to form. Wall film characteristics is still an important subject to study. Due to the various stages of liquid film formation from injection of spray till spray-wall impingement, the investigation of this phenomenon is far more complicated. This paper is meant to provide detailed data on spray-wall impingement and wall film formation physics with the help of computational analysis of OpenFOAM . A Lagrangian-Eulerian method based on discrete phase model (DPM) was employed to model... 

Polymeric microspheres which can load biomolecules, proteins and growth factors play an important role in tissue engineering and drug delivery systems. The size of the microspheres and encapsulation efficiency exert a considerable impact on the usability of them. In this study double emulsion method is used for fabrication of microspheres. Effect of different parameters namely the speed of homogenization, time of homogenization, the amount of polymer in oil phase, the surfactant concentration in different phases on the size and surface morphology of the microspheres are investigated. Moreover, a release test for BSA loaded microspheres is conducted. Results indicate that by increasing the...