Drying air-induced disturbances in multi-layer coating systems

A range of new experimental techniques is developed to quantify drying-air induced disturbances on low viscosity single and multi-layer coating systems. Experiments on prototype slide-bead coating systems show that the surface disturbances take the form of a wavelike pattern and quantify precisely how its amplitude increases rapidly with wet thickness and decreases with viscosity. Heat transfer measurements show that the redistribution of water to form an additional lower viscosity carrier layer while increasing the solids concentration of the upper layer or layers enables the maximum drying rate, for which drying-air induced surface disturbances are acceptably small, to be increased with significant commercial benefits

Trajectory angles of muscles originating from and inserting to the coxal femoral bone measured on MRIs

Trajectory angles of muscles originating from and inserting to the coxal femoral bone measured on MRIs. Open access supplementary material as appendix to the original article "Muscle forces acting on the greater trochanter lead to a dorsal warping of the apophyseal growth plate" published in Journal of Anatomy

Simulation of two- and three-dimensional viscoplastic flows using adaptive mesh refinement

This paper presents a finite element solver for the simulation of steady non-Newtonian flow problems, using a regularized Bingham model, with adaptive mesh refinement capabilities. The solver is based on a stabilized formulation derived from the variational multiscale framework. This choice allows the introduction of an a posteriori error indicator based on the small scale part of the solution, which is used to drive a mesh refinement procedure based on element subdivision. This approach applied to the solution of a series of benchmark examples, which allow us to validate the formulation and assess its capabilities to model 2D and 3D non-Newtonian flows.Postprint (author's final draft

Nanofluids Research: Key Issues

Nanofluids are a new class of fluids engineered by dispersing nanometer-size structures (particles, fibers, tubes, droplets) in base fluids. The very essence of nanofluids research and development is to enhance fluid macroscopic and megascale properties such as thermal conductivity through manipulating microscopic physics (structures, properties and activities). Therefore, the success of nanofluid technology depends very much on how well we can address issues like effective means of microscale manipulation, interplays among physics at different scales and optimization of microscale physics for the optimal megascale properties. In this work, we take heat-conduction nanofluids as examples to review methodologies available to effectively tackle these key but difficult problems and identify the future research needs as well. The reviewed techniques include nanofluids synthesis through liquid-phase chemical reactions in continuous-flow microfluidic microreactors, scaling-up by the volume averaging and constructal design with the constructal theory. The identified areas of future research contain microfluidic nanofluids, thermal waves and constructal nanofluids