Electrohydrodynamics of drops is a classic fluid mechanical problem where deformations and microscale flows are generated by application of an external electric field. In weak fields, electric stresses acting on the drop surface drive quadrupolar flows inside and outside and cause the drop to adopt a steady axisymmetric shape. This phenomenon is best explained by the leaky-dielectric model under the premise that a net surface charge is present at the interface while the bulk fluids are electroneutral. In the case of dielectric drops, increasing the electric field beyond a critical value can cause the drop to start rotating spontaneously and assume a steady tilted shape. This symmetry-breaking phenomenon, called Quincke rotation, arises due to the action of the interfacial electric torque countering the viscous torque on the drop, giving rise to steady rotation in sufficiently strong fields. Here, we present a small-deformation theory for the electrohydrodynamics of dielectric drops for the complete Melcher–Taylor leaky-dielectric model in three dimensions. Our theory is valid in the limits of strong capillary forces and highly viscous drops and is able to capture the transition to Quincke rotation. A coupled set of nonlinear ordinary differential equations for the induced dipole moments and shape functions are derived whose solution matches well with experimental results in the appropriate small-deformation regime. Retention of both the straining and rotational components of the flow in the governing equation for charge transport enables us to perform a linear stability analysis and derive a criterion for the applied electric field strength that must be overcome for the onset of Quincke rotation of a viscous drop.
more »
« less
Shape Optimization of Optical Microscale Inclusions
This paper describes a class of shape optimization problems for optical metamaterials comprised of periodic microscale inclusions composed of a dielectric, low-dimensional material suspended in a non-magnetic bulk dielectric. The shape optimization approach is based on a homogenization theory for time-harmonic Maxwell's equations that describes effective material parameters for the propagation of electromagnetic waves through the metamaterial. The control parameter of the optimization is a deformation field representing the deviation of the microscale geometry from a reference configuration of the cell problem. This allows for describing the homogenized effective permittivity tensor as a function of the deformation field. We show that the underlying deformed cell problem is well-posed and regular. This, in turn, proves that the shape optimization problem is well-posed. In addition, a numerical scheme is formulated that utilizes an adjoint formulation with either gradient descent or BFGS as optimization algorithms. The developed algorithm is tested numerically on a number of prototypical shape optimization problems with a prescribed effective permittivity tensor as the target.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2045636
- PAR ID:
- 10525705
- Publisher / Repository:
- SIAM
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing
- Volume:
- 46
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 1064-8275
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- B377 to B402
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Shape optimization adjoint formulation inverse homogenization plasmonic crystals time-harmonic Maxwell's equations
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
This paper presents a simulation-based study on the relative permittivity of 3D printed dielectric slabs printed with varying infill densities. In this study, a percentage volumetric model has been employed to model the infill density in a 3D printed dielectric slab. The relative permittivity of the filament material used to design the slab is assumed to be 2.45. The modeled slab is fitted into various rectangular waveguides with varying dimensions corresponding to different frequency ranges. As the infill density decreases, the relative permittivity of the dielectric slabs decreases. This lower value of relative permittivity is referred to as effective relative permittivity (εr.eff) throughout the paper. The study concludes that the effective relative permittivity of the slab decreases linearly as the infill density is decreased for the model. This study offers valuable insights into the effective relative permittivity of dielectric slabs under varying infill densities, providing implications for applications in areas such as antenna design.more » « less
-
With an unprecedented combination of mechanical and electrical properties, polymer nanocomposites have the potential to be widely used across multiple industries. Tailoring nanocomposites to meet application specific requirements remains a challenging task, owing to the vast, mixed-variable design space that includes composition ( i.e. choice of polymer, nanoparticle, and surface modification) and microstructures ( i.e. dispersion and geometric arrangement of particles) of the nanocomposite material. Modeling properties of the interphase, the region surrounding a nanoparticle, introduces additional complexity to the design process and requires computationally expensive simulations. As a result, previous attempts at designing polymer nanocomposites have focused on finding the optimal microstructure for only a fixed combination of constituents. In this article, we propose a data centric design framework to concurrently identify optimal composition and microstructure using mixed-variable Bayesian optimization. This framework integrates experimental data with state-of-the-art techniques in interphase modeling, microstructure characterization and reconstructions and machine learning. Latent variable Gaussian processes (LVGPs) quantifies the lack-of-data uncertainty over the mixed-variable design space that consists of qualitative and quantitative material design variables. The design of electrically insulating nanocomposites is cast as a multicriteria optimization problem with the goal of maximizing dielectric breakdown strength while minimizing dielectric permittivity and dielectric loss. Within tens of simulations, our method identifies a diverse set of designs on the Pareto frontier indicating the tradeoff between dielectric properties. These findings project data centric design, effectively integrating experimental data with simulations for Bayesian Optimization, as an effective approach for design of engineered material systems.more » « less
-
Initializing simulations of deformable objects involves setting the rest state of all internal forces at the rest shape of the object. However, often times the rest shape is not explicitly provided. In its absence, it is common to initialize by treating the given initial shape as the rest shape. This leads to sagging, the undesirable deformation under gravity as soon as the simulation begins. Prior solutions to sagging are limited to specific simulation systems and material models, most of them cannot handle frictional contact, and they require solving expensive global nonlinear optimization problems. We introduce a novel solution to the sagging problem that can be applied to a variety of simulation systems and materials. The key feature of our approach is that we avoid solving a global nonlinear optimization problem by performing the initialization in two stages. First, we use a global linear optimization for static equilibrium. Any nonlinearity of the material definition is handled in the local stage, which solves many small local problems efficiently and in parallel. Notably, our method can properly handle frictional contact orders of magnitude faster than prior work. We show that our approach can be applied to various simulation systems by presenting examples with mass-spring systems, cloth simulations, the finite element method, the material point method, and position-based dynamics.more » « less
-
We introduce a general differentiable solver for time-dependent deformation problems with contact and friction. Our approach uses a finite element discretization with a high-order time integrator coupled with the recently proposed incremental potential contact method for handling contact and friction forces to solve ODE- and PDE-constrained optimization problems on scenes with complex geometry. It supports static and dynamic problems and differentiation with respect to all physical parameters involved in the physical problem description, which include shape, material parameters, friction parameters, and initial conditions. Our analytically derived adjoint formulation is efficient, with a small overhead (typically less than 10% for nonlinear problems) over the forward simulation, and shares many similarities with the forward problem, allowing the reuse of large parts of existing forward simulator code. We implement our approach on top of the open-source PolyFEM library and demonstrate the applicability of our solver to shape design, initial condition optimization, and material estimation on both simulated results and physical validations.more » « less
An official website of the United States government

