Abinitha Gourabathina ’23
Operations Research and Financial Engineering
Simulating Multiphase Flow Through Large-Scale Water Systems
Certificate(s): Linguistics, Statistics and Machine Learning
My project focused on using molecular dynamics (MD) to simulate quartz-water surface interactions with large-scale water droplets. Using the open-source program Large-scale Atomic/Molecular Massively Parallel Simulator (LAMMPS), we modeled water molecules in both prism and disk conformations to analyze how water droplets spread and behave on quartz surfaces. The relatively large water droplets for atomistic simulations will push the boundaries of MD system scales, which will allow us to make connections between micro- and macro-scale properties and contribute to improving coarse-grained modeling in the future. After this project, I will work with the Bourg Research Group to investigate how changing the hydrophilicity of the surface will affect the behavior of the water as well and extract the resulting wetting properties. From the MD simulations, we would like to compare the extracted wettability data to that of typically larger-scale continuum fluid dynamics simulations.
2020
Water and the Environment
Interfacial Water Group, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Princeton University
Ian Bourg, Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the High Meadows Environmental Institute; Emily Wei-Hsin Sun, Ph.D. candidate, Civil and Environmental Engineering