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The formation and evolution of micron-sized droplets of a Newtonian liquid generated on demand in an industrial inkjet printhead are studied experimentally and simulated numerically. The shapes and positions of droplets during droplet formation are observed using a high-speed camera and compared with their numerically obtained analogs. Both the experiments and the simulations use practical length scales for inkjet printing. The results show how fluid properties, specifically viscosity and surface tension, affect the drop formation, ligament length, and breakoff time. We identify the parameter space of fluid properties for producing single drops at a prescribed speed and show this is not simply a restriction on the Ohnesorge number, but that there is an additional restriction on the Reynolds number that is distinct from the Reynolds number limit associated with the prevention of splashing. This phase diagram provides more precise guidance on the space of fluid parameters for jetting single droplets in drop-on-demand inkjet printers.

The flow of a bi-disperse polymer melt through a hyperbolic contraction is simulated using the recently proposed Rolie-Double-Poly constitutive model (Boudara et al., 2019). This simplified tube model takes account of the nonlinear coupling between the dynamics of the long and short-chains in a bi-disperse blend, in particular it reproduces the enhancement of the stretch relaxation time that arises from the coupling between constraint release and chain retraction. Flow calculations are performed by implementing both the Rolie-Double-Poly and multimode Rolie-Poly models in OpenFOAM using the RheolTool library. While both models predict very similar flow patterns, the enhanced stretch relaxation of the Rolie-Double-Pol models results in an increase in the molecular stretch of the long chain component in the pure extensional flow along the centre-line of the contraction, but a decrease in the stretch in shear-flow near the channel walls.

© 2019 This paper is concerned with the development and application of optimally efficient numerical methods for the simulation of vascular tumour growth. This model used involves the flow and interaction of four different, but coupled, phases which are each treated as incompressible fluids, Hubbard and Byrne (2013). A finite volume scheme is used to approximate mass conservation, with conforming finite element schemes to approximate momentum conservation and an associated equation. The principal contribution of this paper is the development of a novel block preconditioner for solving the linear systems arising from the discrete momentum equations at each time step. In particular, the preconditioned system has both a solution time and a memory requirement that is shown to scale almost linearly with the problem size.

Stencil computations form the heart of numerical simulations to solve Partial Differential Equations using Finite Difference, Finite Element, and Finite Volume methods. Geometric Multigrid is an optimal O(N), hierarchical tool employing stencil computations in its chief constituents, namely, smoothing, restriction, and interpolation. When Multigrid is parallelized over distributed‐shared memory architectures, traditionally, the domain partitioning creates cubic partitions of the mesh to minimize overall communication. Thus, the orthodox approach considers only load‐balancing and communication minimization for completely determining the domain partitioning. In this article, we show that these two factors are not sufficient to obtain optimal partitions for Parallel Geometric Multigrid. To this effect, we develop and validate a high level analytical model to show that “close to 2‐D” partitions for Geometric Multigrid can give higher performance than the partitions returned by the MPI_Dims_create() function which minimizes the communication volume by default. We quantify sub‐domain level cache‐misses in Parallel Geometric Multigrid and obtain families of optimal domain partitions. We conclude that the sub‐domain level cache‐misses for the application‐specific stencil computational kernel and communicated planes should be taken into account in addition to communication minimization/load‐balance to obtain optimal partitions for Parallel Geometric Multigrid.