The focus of my research activity is at the intersection of safety engineering, computer science, and physics of fluids. I am particularly interested in a broad spectrum of very important engineering applications and natural processes all of which feature Intense Multiphase Interactions ( IMI) and characterized by rapid generation and evolution of interfacial area. Specific examples of engineering applications include safety and analysis of accident processes in nuclear and chemical reactors; design and optimization of combustion and liquid fuel pulse detonation engines; explosive dispersal of liquid and solid material; atmospheric dissemination of chemical agents; other defense and national-security applications, including development of advanced weaponry; bubble dynamics and physics of sonoluminescense; microparticle targeting and laser radiation in photomedicine; inertial confinement fusion, to name but a few.

All Intense Multiphase Interactions feature significant physical complexity, as the underlying processes are of multi-physics and multi-scale nature. In particular, the continuum-mechanics description in terms of conservation laws (i.e., Navier-Stokes or averaged/multifluid equations) is not sufficient/appropriate in presence of flow and material discontinuities (shocks, contacts) or near-critical phenomena (e.g., homogeneous and heterogeneous nucleation in boiling, cavitation, phase change and multiphase pattern formation in dispersed systems). This requires development of mesoscale description in terms of interfacial jump conditions (including phase-change, chemical reactions and physico-chemical processes), mutlifluid Riemann Solvers, intermolecular forces/potentials represented in a phase-field/discrete-kinetics fashion; all at the level of subgrid-scale modeling. In addition to great disparity of length scales between continuum-mechanics and mesoscale-physics, intense (energetic) interactions are characterized by separation of time scales, requiring effective resolution of both acoustic (wave-dynamics) and material (interface-dynamics) time scales. I believe that seamless and efficient ways to connect these two physics are instrumental to capturing and discovering complex physics in multiphase flow systems. Within the above-described vision, my efforts in the past have been focused on the development of computational methods and platform to enable a bridging of mesoscale physics with continuum mechanics.
     
This page was last updated January 13, 2007 . Please direct questions or comments to robert.nourgaliev@inl.gov.