The dynamics of concentrated suspensions of solid particles in a viscous fluid is a problem of great technical interest and computational challenge. Our goal is to develop fast algorithms for the computational study of these systems including the effects of many-body hydrodynamic interactions, interparticle forces, and stochastic Brownian motion.
Owing to the difficulty of accurately computing the hydrodynamic interactions, the computational cost of traditional methods scales as O(N³) which has limited simulations to systems of N=25-100 particles. In our research group, new algorithms have been developed which scale as O(N ln N). Dynamic simulations have been performed for up to 64,000 particles for non-Brownian suspensions and 27,000 particles for Brownian suspensions. Simulated systems include hard spheres, plate-like particles, slightly deformable particles, and fibers.
This poster outlines the governing equations and computational algorithms as well as presents some simulation results and plans for future research.