Olivier Desjardins
Cornell University, NY·Engineering
When a liquid jet or sheet breaks apart, it first tears into thin threads and then into a fine mist of droplets. Those droplets may spread out, evaporate, burn or dry into solid particles.
- Fields
Engineering
Computer Science
Physics
- Topics
sprays
atomization
multiphase flow
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Aug 2029
What they work on
- Develop a piecewise-quadratic interface representation that captures liquid sheets and ligaments thinner than one simulation grid cell, so that computers can predict when and how liquids break apart.
- Build a volume-filtered simulation framework with physics-informed closure models that add the effects of unresolved surface tension, aiming to predict breakup, coalescence and droplet size distributions without costly direct numerical simulation.
- Combine interface capturing, sub-grid breakup models, droplet and particle tracking, multicomponent evaporation and reduced chemical kinetics into one discretely conservative, scalable open-source spray code that works for both slow and compressible flows.
- Deploy a retrieval-augmented AI assistant that uses the code's documentation to check input parameters and generate simulation cases from natural-language descriptions, aiming to cut setup time from weeks to hours.
- Validate the unified framework against partner-provided experimental data for spray combustion, spray drying, surface coating, and droplet impact and erosion, and publish reproducible benchmarks.
More about the research
This happens in fuel injectors, inhalers, paint sprayers, crop sprayers and the spray dryers that make food and drug powders. In each case, how well the spray works decides energy use, emissions, product quality and cost. Predicting a spray with a computer is hard because the important events happen at once and across a huge range of sizes. The thinnest films and smallest droplets are often smaller than a simulation's grid can see. The lab's two projects attack this problem from two sides. One builds better mathematical models for these sub-grid details. The other combines today's scattered simulation tools into one open-source program that non-experts can use.
Why it matters
More accurate and affordable spray simulations could help engineers design fuel injectors that use less energy and cut emissions in transportation and power. They could also improve the making of medicines, food powders, crop protection sprays and coatings. Releasing the tools as open source, adding them to commercial codes, and pairing them with an AI setup assistant aims to put predictive spray modeling within reach of industry engineers who are not simulation specialists.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Gbemeho Agbaglah
Wayne State University, MI·Engineering
Characterize the gas-driven transverse fluctuations that develop across planar liquid films under high-speed gas flow, the instabilities that set up the liquid structures which later break into droplets.
Roozbeh Salary
Marshall University, WV·Engineering
Identify the airflow effects that set feature size and resolution in aerosol jet printing, using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations of how gas and ink droplets move.
Xiaoyu Tang
Northeastern University, MA·Engineering·Early-career
Build an experimental platform that combines several advanced diagnostic methods to resolve flow, stress and particle concentration inside complex-fluid droplets as they hit surfaces, including opaque particle suspensions.
The school
Cornell University: 37 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 537 research doctorates a year.
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