Angela Cheer, UC Davis

Fluid mechanics of filter feeding

Friday March 28th, 4pm, Phillips 332
(refreshments served in Phillips 330 starting at 3:30)

Abstract:
One of the major impediments for flow simulation in complicated three-dimensional configurations is the discretization of the physical domain. In order to closely model the geometric complexity and capture the interesting fluid dynamics a zonal approach and an overlapped grid-embedding scheme is presented. The three-dimensional unsteady Navier-Stokes equations written in generalized curvilinear coordinates are then solved iteratively on each of the computational grids, at each physical time-step, until a converged solution is achieved.

This approach is used to study flow in the oral cavity of blackfish to understand the mechanism of particle capture, the flow past lobster olfactory antenna and the explosive suction-feeding event of fishes.