Dr. LaiLai Zhu, Princeton University

Emerging instabilities and bifurcations from deformable fluid interfaces in the inertialess regime 

In this talk, I will present two studies regarding the dynamics of droplets in the creeping flow, focusing on the arising instability and bifurcation phenomena. The first work investigates a buoyancy-driven droplet translating in a quiescent environment and the second a particle-encapsulating droplet in shear flow. There-dimensional simulations based on versatile boundary integral methods were employed to explore the intriguing instability and bifurcation phenomena in the inertialess flow. In the first work, a non-modal stability analysis was performed to predict the critical condition of instability; and in the second, a dynamic system approach was adopted to model and characterize the interacting bifurcations.