CCSE Research: Fluctuating Hydrodynamics
CCSE Home

Overview

AMReX

People

Publications


Membranes and Complex Interfaces

Membranes play an important role in many biological processes, particularly at a cellular level. Processes such as desalination and catalysis also involve membranes and complex interfaces. Understanding the complex interplay between a fluid and one of these interfaces requires an accurate representation of thermal fluctuations at the mesoscale, such as that given by fluctuating hydrodynamics or DSMC.
Transpiration

A fluid in a non-equilibrium state exhibits long-ranged correlations of its hydrodynamic fluctuations. In this project, we examine the effect of a transpiration interface on these correlations -- specifically, we consider a dilute gas in a domain bisected by the interface. The system is held in a non-equilibrium steady state by using isothermal walls to impose a temperature gradient. The gas is simulated using both direct simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) and fluctuating hydrodynamics (FHD). For the FHD simulations two models are developed for the interface based on master equation and Langevin approaches. For appropriate simulation parameters, good agreement is observed between DSMC and FHD results with the latter showing a significant advantage in computational speed. For each approach we quantify the effects of transpiration on long-ranged correlations in the hydrodynamic variables.