On a Few Puzzles in Interfacial Fluid Mechanics

IAM Seminar
January 28, 2013 11:00 pm

Speaker:  Asst. Prof. Rouslan Krechetnikov, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California, Santa Barbara

URL for Speaker:  http://www.engineering.ucsb.edu/~rkrechet-lab/files/people/PI/index.html

Location:  LSK 460

Intended Audience:  Public

Interfacial fluid mechanics has always been an inexhaustible source of challenging questions. In this talk I will discuss three long-standing problems and our recent progress on their understanding. First, I will present the experiments on self-agitation of a pendant drop, which results from a chemical reaction at the drop interface and which generates a number of nontrivial features: nonlinear auto-oscillations, tip-streaming, and droplet trajectory splitting. The second problem addresses the controversy in the current understanding of Marangoni effects in the classical Landau-Levich problem of a film deposition by a substrate withdrawal. The talk concludes with a discussion of the nature of the crown forming instability in the drop splash problem. Namely, I will describe some recent experiments on the drop splash problem, in which a drop impinges on a thin film of the same liquid, and provide some novel theoretical insights into the nature of the fundamental instability responsible for the crown formation.

Dr. Rouslan Krechetnikov is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Krechetnikov earned his Ph.D. degree in Applied Mathematics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (Phystech) in 2004. Before joining UCSB he spent a year (2007-2008) as an Assistant Professor of Mathematics (tenure-track) at the University of Alberta (Edmonton, Canada) and a year (2006-2007) at Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada) in the same capacity. Before that, Dr. Krechetnikov was a Posdoctoral Fellow at the California Institute of Technology (2004-2006) and at UCSB (2002-2004).