Gbemeho Agbaglah
Wayne State University, MI·Engineering
Whenever a liquid breaks apart into droplets, from rain forming to fuel spraying into an engine, the resulting droplet sizes matter enormously. One of the most common industrial ways to make fine droplets is air-blast atomization: a thin sheet of liquid is torn apart by a fast stream of gas.
- Fields
Engineering
Physics
Mathematics & Statistics
- Topics
atomization
liquid films
bag breakup
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2028
What they work on
- 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.
- Simulate the deformation, inflation and rupture of rectangular liquid films under high-speed gas using high-fidelity direct numerical simulations that resolve the moving gas-liquid interface.
- Develop a mechanistic model of spray droplet size distribution for air-blast atomization that explicitly accounts for hole formation and collision, fingering instability, and rim fragmentation during bag breakup.
- Validate the simulations and the resulting droplet size model against experiments across a range of gas and liquid conditions relevant to aerospace, chemical and agricultural sprays.
More about the research
This is how fuel is prepared in power generation and propulsion, how pesticides are sprayed on crops, and how coatings are applied to surfaces. Yet predicting what droplet sizes come out remains unreliable, because the breakup is a messy, fast, multi-stage process and existing models leave out important steps.
Why it matters
Spray systems in aerospace propulsion, chemical processing, and agricultural spraying are designed around droplet size, which controls how fast a fuel burns or how well a pesticide covers a leaf instead of drifting away. A model that predicts droplet size distributions more accurately from the underlying physics could give engineers a better basis for designing and operating atomizers, and would advance fundamental understanding of gas-liquid breakup in fluid dynamics.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Olivier Desjardins
Cornell University, NY·Engineering
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.
Bryan Schmidt
Case Western Reserve University, OH·Engineering
Design lattices of phononic subsurfaces, engineered material units placed under a surface, and use stability theory and direct numerical simulations to test whether they suppress turbulence-causing disturbances downstream and from varying directions.
Shyam Menon
Louisiana State University, LA·Engineering·Early-career
Measure unsteady drag and heat transfer on single particles suddenly accelerated in a shock tube, using particle motion and temperature measurements to evaluate existing models.
The school
Wayne State University: 21 labs on PI Pages, $292M a year on research, 194 research doctorates a year.
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