Capillary-Dominated Systems: Applications and Analogs

Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science Seminar

Bauyrzhan Primkulov
Intructor, Applied Mathematics
MIT

"Capillary-Dominated Systems: Applications and Analogs"

Abstract: Capillary-dominated systems have a remarkable potential for informing both industrial applications and fundamental science through bench-scale experiments and analogs. In Part 1 of this talk, we overview the dynamics and patterns that arise when one fluid displaces another in porous media. We use computational models and experiments to examine how wettability, viscous and capillary forces shape these patterns at various scales. We highlight the emergence of avalanches and stick-slip dynamics in the presence of background disorder. In Part 2, we outline the developments in the emerging field of pilot-wave hydrodynamics—a millimeter-scale system that exhibits many features previously thought to be exclusive to the quantum realm. We briefly introduce our analog to a conventionally challenging Kapitza-Dirac effect, which is a beautiful demonstration of the particle-wave duality.

Bio: Bauyrzhan Primkulov is an Instructor of Applied Mathematics at MIT. He received his PhD in Civil Engineering from MIT and MSc in Chemical Engineering from University of Alberta. He was awarded CEE Best Doctoral Thesis Award and MathWorks Fellowship during his doctoral studies. His research is broadly aimed at problems where capillarity plays a feature-defining role; this includes fluid-fluid displacement in disordered environments and pilot-wave hydrodynamics.

March 3 at 3:00pm in Mason 107