Dimecres 19 de maig, a les 12h, a la Sala de Graus de les Facultats de Ciències i de Biociències, hi haurà el Colloqui del departament de Matemàtiques titulat Mathematical modelling of phase changes, a càrrec de Tym Myers(Centre de Recerca matemàtica).

Resum:
Mathematical research is often viewed as being rather abstract, with little relevance for the real world. In this talk we challenge this question by focussing on recent research concerning industrial applications of mathematics. The talk will begin with a brief overview of a number of industrial mathematics problems. We will then concentrate on two common applications: • Thin film flows: Thin film modelling is typically applied to coating problems e.g. in the manufacture of CDs/DVDs, cine-film, tv screens or simply any form of painting. • Phase change: Melting, solidification, evaporation etc occur in many physical processes such as the manufacture of steel and glass, lava flow, melting of nanoparticles and ice accretion. Thin film flow is usually governed by a fourth-order nonlinear PDE, which exhibits a rich variety of interesting behaviour. We will discuss the derivation and solution methods for thin film equations and show typical results. Despite over 100 years of research into the field of phase change there remains only one physically interesting exact solution. We will discuss the governing equations and show how to obtain this exact solution as well as approximate solution methods. Finally, some recent work which combines thin film flow with phase change (ice accretion on inight aircraft, the evaporation of water droplets on a hot surface and contact melting) will be described and results compared against experiment data.