Return to Colloquia & Seminar listing
Multiscale Computation of Flow Through Heterogeneous Media
Applied MathSpeaker: | Tom Hou, CalTech |
Location: | 693 Kerr |
Start time: | Fri, May 16 2003, 4:10PM |
Many problems of fundamental and practical importance contain multiple scale solutions. Composite materials, flow and transport in porous media, and turbulent flow are examples of this type. Direct numerical simulations of these multiscale problems are extremely difficult due to the range of length scales in the underlying physical problems. Here, we introduce a dynamic multiscale method for computing nonlinear partial differential equations with multiscale solutions. The main idea is to construct semi-analytic multiscale solutions local in space and time, and use them to construct the coarse grid approximation to the global multiscale solution. Such approach overcomes the common difficulty associated with the memory effect in deriving the global averaged equations for incompressible flows with multiscale solutions. It provides an effective multiscale numerical method for computing two-phase flow and incompressible Euler and Navier-Stokes equations with multiscale solutions.