Objective: Understand hydrodynamic effects on colloidal sedimentation.

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Hydrodynamic effects in sedimentation

• Objective Understand hydrodynamic effects on
  colloidal sedimentation.
• Approach Implement stochastic rotation
  dynamics for colloidal suspensions. Here the
  fluid is treated in a coarse-grained manner, but
  in sufficient detail to reproduce true
  hydrodynamics. While much more efficient than
  full-scale fluid simulation, this is still a
  time-consuming method.
• Significant results We have now successfully
  implemented a parallel version that exhibits
  unprecedented scalability. The code will be made
  freely available to others.
• Why it matters Colloidal sedimentation and
  templating are important in many industrial
  areas, such as photonic bandgap materials and
  novel data storage media. Conventional simulation
  methods do not incorporate important hydrodynamic
  effects. With excellent scalability, our method
  makes it possible to address new classes of
  problems.
• Principal Investigator
• E. Luijten (UIUC), Student Jonathan K. Whitmer

Sedimenting, attractive colloids (green) in an
environment of 500,000 fluid particles (not shown)
Funding MCC NSF CAREER Award.