STUDYING OF THE DEFORMABLE DROPLET DYNAMICS IN CHANNEL FLOW
Modeling of motion of two-phase liquids in microchannels of different shape is needed for a variety of industrial applications, such as enhanced oil recovery, advanced material processing, and biotechnology. Development of efficient computational techniques is required for understanding the mechanisms of many effects in “liquid-liquid” systems, such as the jamming of emulsion flows in microchannels and blood cell motion in capillaries. In the present study, a mathematical model of a three-dimensional flow of a mixture of two Newtonian liquids of a droplet structure in microchannels at low Reynold’s numbers is considered. The developed approach is based on the boundary element method for three-dimensional problems accelerated via utilization of a heterogeneous computing architecture (multicore CPUs and graphics processors). Implementation of the software enables selection of optimal algorithms depending on the problem size. The developed program code is used for studying of the emulsion droplet deformation and relative droplet velocity in channel flow; it was also utilized for calculation of the emulsion rheology characteristics. The features of the dynamics of different type of emulsions in microchannels are discussed. The developed approach can be used for solution of problems related to emulsion flows in microscale.