Mechanical Engineering Seminar

Computational Investigations of Gravity and Turbidity Currents

Eckart Meiburg, Ph.D.

Department of Mechanical Engineering

University of California at Santa-Barbara

Abstract

We will present an overview of high-resolution, Navier-Stokes based simulations of gravity and turbidity currents, with the focus being on the standard lock-exchange configuration. The turbidity currents considered are driven by particles that have negligible inertia and are much smaller than the smallest length scales of the buoyancy-induced fluid motion. For the mathematical description of the particulate phase an Eulerian approach is employed with a transport equation for the local particle-number density. The governing equations are integrated numerically with a high-order, mixed compact finite difference and spectral/spectral-element technique.

We will discuss differences between two- and three-dimensional gravity current dynamics. Flow features due to large, non-Boussinesq density differences will be analyzed, and differences in the dynamics of the light and heavy fronts will be discussed. In the presence of a sloping bottom the early, constant front velocity phase is seen to give rise to a second phase characterized by the dynamics of horizontal layers accelerating past each other, similar to the classical analysis by Thorpe. Some effects due to stratification of the ambient will be discussed as well. Some first results will be shown regarding the unsteady interaction of a gravity current with a submarine structure, such as a pipeline.

Tuesday, April 8, 2008, 10:30 am


3540 Engineering


Refreshments served at 10:15 am


If you would like to spend some time with Dr. Eckart Meiburg,

please contact 
Dr. Guy Raguin at raguin@egr.msu.edu or 432-3192


Short Biography

Professor Eckart H. Meiburg received his PhD from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1985. After a post-doctoral position at Stanford in the Department of Chemical Engineering in 1986-1987, he came to Brown University as an assistant professor in the Division of Applied Mathematics and stayed until 1990. Professor Meiburg then became an associate professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Southern California in 1990, and was promoted to full professor in 1997. Finally, Professor Meiburg joined the Department of Mechanical and Environmental Engineering at the University of California at Santa Barbara in 2000, and he is the Chair of the department since 2003. In the course of his career, Professor Meiburg received the Presidential Young Investigator Award (National Science Foundation) in 1990 and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Senior Research Award in 2005.