Search the School of Mathematical Sciences

Time-periodic shear layers occur naturally in a wide range of applications from engineering to physiology. Transition to turbulence in such flows is of practical interest and there have been several papers dealing with the stability of flows composed of a steady component plus an oscillatory part with zero mean. In such flows a possible instability mechanism is associated with the mean component so that the stability of the flow can be examined using some sort of perturbation-type analysis. This strategy fails when the mean part of the flow is small compared with the oscillatory component which, of course, includes the case when the mean part is precisely zero.

This difficulty with analytical studies has meant that the stability of purely oscillatory flows has relied on various numerical methods. Until very recently such techniques have only ever predicted that the flow is stable, even though experiments suggest that they do become unstable at high enough speeds. In this talk I shall expand on this discrepancy with emphasis on the particular case of the so-called flat Stokes layer. This flow, which is generated in a deep layer of incompressible fluid lying above a flat plate which is oscillated in its own plane, represents one of the few exact solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations. We show theoretically that the flow does become unstable to waves which propagate relative to the basic motion although the theory predicts that this occurs much later than has been found in experiments. Reasons for this discrepancy are examined by reference to calculations for oscillatory flows in pipes and channels. Finally, we propose some new experiments that might reduce this disagreement between the theoretical predictions of instability and practical realisations of breakdown in oscillatory flows.

Honey dripping from an upturned spoon is an everyday example of a flow that extends and breaks up into drops. Such flows have been of interest for over 300 years, attracting the attention of Plateau and Rayleigh among others. Theoretical understanding has, however, lagged behind experimental investigation, with major progress being made only in the last two decades, driven by industrial applications including ink-jet printing, spinning of polymer and glass fibres, blow-moulding of containers, light bulbs and glass tubing, and rheological measurement by fibre extension. Albeit, the exact details of the final stages of breakup are yet to be fully resolved. An aspect that is relatively unexplored is the evolution of drop and filament from some initial configuration, and the influence of initial conditions on the final breakup. We will consider a drop of very viscous fluid hanging beneath a solid boundary, similar to honey dripping from an upturned spoon, using methods that allow examination of development and behaviour from early time, when a drop and filament begin to form, out to large times when the bulk of the fluid forms a drop at the bottom of a long thin filament which connects it with the upper boundary. The roles of gravity, inertia and surface tension will be examined.

These well-known differential operators are, of course, important in applied mathematics. This is just the tip of an iceberg. I shall indicate some of what lies beneath the surface. There are links with topology, physics, symmetry groups, finite element schemes, and more besides. This talk will touch on these different topics by means of examples. Little prior knowledge will be assumed beyond the equality of mixed partial derivatives.

The breakup of a mass of fluid into drops is a ubiquitous phenomenon in daily life, the natural environment and technology, with common examples including a dripping tap, ocean spray and ink-jet printing. It is a feature of many generic industrial processes such as spraying, emulsification, aeration, mixing and atomisation, and is an undesirable feature in coating and fibre spinning. Surface-tension driven pinch-off and the subsequent recoil are examples of finite-time singularities in which the interfacial curvature becomes infinite at the point of disconnection. As a result, the flow near the point of disconnection becomes self-similar and independent of initial and far-field conditions. Similarity solutions will be presented for the cases of inviscid and very viscous flow, along with comparison to experiments. In each case, a boundary-integral representation can be used both to examine the time-dependent behaviour and as the basis of a modified Newton scheme for direct solution of the similarity equations.

The standard diffusion equation is obtained by Einstein's method and its generalisation, Fokker-Plank-Kolmogorov-Feller theory. The time between jumps in Einstein derivation is constant.

We discuss random walks with residence time distribution, which occurs for flows of solutes and suspensions/colloids in porous media, CO2 sequestration in coal mines, several processes in chemical, petroleum and environmental engineering. The rigorous application of the Einstein's method results in new equation, containing the time and the mixed dispersion terms expressing the dispersion of the particle time steps.

Usually, adding the second time derivative results in additional initial data. For the equation derived, the condition of limited solution when time tends to infinity provides with uniqueness of the Caushy problem solution.

The solution of the pulse injection problem describing a common tracer injection experiment is studied in greater detail. The new theory predicts delay of the maximum of the tracer, compared to the velocity of the flow, while its forward "tail" contains much more particles than in the solution of the classical parabolic (advection-dispersion) equation. This is in agreement with the experimental observations and predictions of the direct simulation.

In this talk, we will survey a number of different free boundary problems involving slow viscous (Stokes) flows in which surface tension is active on the free boundary. Both steady and unsteady flows will be considered. Motivating applications range from industrial processes such as viscous sintering (where end-products are formed as a result of the surface-tension-driven densification of a compact of smaller particles that are heated in order that they coalesce) to biological phenomena such as understanding how organisms swim (i.e. propel themselves) at low Reynolds numbers. Common to our approach to all these problems will be an analytical/theoretical treatment of model problems via complex variable methods -- techniques well-known at infinite Reynolds numbers but used much less often in the Stokes regime. These model problems can give helpful insights into the behaviour of the true physical systems.

This talk is concerned with the evolution of an unbounded inviscid fluid-fluid interface subject to an axisymmetric impulse in pressure and how inertial, interfacial and gravitational forces affect that evolution. The construct was motivated by the occurrence of lung hemorrhage resulting from ultrasonic imaging and pursues the notion that bursts of ultrasound act to expel droplets that puncture the soft air-filled sacs in the lung plural surface allowing them to fill with blood. The evolution of the free surface is described by a boundary integral formulation which is integrated forward in time numerically. As the interface evolves, it is seen, depending upon the levels of gravity and surface tension, to form either axisymmetric surface jets, waves or droplets. Moreover the droplets may be spherical, inverted tear-shaped or pancake like. Also of interest is the finite time singularity which occurs when the drop pinches off; this is seen to be of the power law type with an exponent of 2/3.

The last scientific conversation I had with Ernie Tuck was on liquid impact. As a matter of fact, we discussed the paper by J.H. Milgram, Journal of Fluid Mechanics 37 (1969), entitled "The motion of a fluid in a cylindrical container with a free surface following vertical impact." Liquid impact is a key issue in sloshing and in particular in sloshing in tanks of LNG vessels. Numerical simulations of sloshing have been performed by various groups, using various types of numerical methods. In terms of the numerical results, the outcome is often impressive, but the question remains of how relevant these results are when it comes to determining impact pressures. The numerical models are too simplified to reproduce the high variability of the measured pressures. In fact, for the time being, it is not possible to simulate accurately both global and local effects. Unfortunately it appears that local effects predominate over global effects when the behaviour of pressures is considered. Having said this, it is important to point out that numerical studies can be quite useful to perform sensitivity analyses in idealized conditions such as a liquid mass falling under gravity on top of a horizontal wall and then spreading along the lateral sides. Simple analytical models inspired by numerical results on idealized problems can also be useful to predict trends. The talk is organized as follows: After a brief introduction on the sloshing problem and on scaling laws, it will be explained to what extent numerical studies can be used to improve our understanding of impact pressures. Results on a liquid mass hitting a wall obtained by a finite-volume code with interface reconstruction as well as results obtained by a simple analytical model will be shown to reproduce the trends of experiments on sloshing. This is joint work with L. Brosset (GazTransport & Technigaz), J.-M. Ghidaglia (ENS Cachan) and J.-P. Braeunig (INRIA).

The study of wall-bounded turbulent flows has received great attention over the past few years as a result of high Reynolds number experiments conducted in new high Reynolds number facilities such as the Princeton "superpipe", the NDF facility in Chicago and the HRNBLWT at the University of Melbourne. These experiments have brought into question the fundamental scaling laws of the turbulence and mean flow quantities as well as revealed high Reynolds number phenomena, which make extrapolation of low Reynolds number results highly questionable. In this talk these issues will be reviewed and new results from the HRNBLWT and atmospheric surface layer on the salt-flats of Utah will be presented documenting unique high Reynolds number phenomena. The implications for skin-friction drag reduction technologies and improved near-wall models for large-eddy simulation will be discussed.

The Hilbert scheme ${\mathrm Hilb}^nS$ of points on a K3 surface $S$ is a well-known holomorphic symplectic manifold. When does ${\mathrm Hilb}^nS$ admit a Lagrangian fibration? The existence of a Lagrangian fibration places some conditions on the Hodge structure, since the pull back of a hyperplane from the base gives a special divisor on ${\mathrm Hilb}^nS$, and in turn a special divisor on $S$. The converse is more difficult, but using Fourier-Mukai transforms we will show that if $S$ admits a divisor of a certain degree then ${\mathrm Hilb}^nS$ admits a Lagrangian fibration.

In 1970, two independent studies (by Wunsch and Phillips) of the behaviour of a linear density-stratified viscous fluid in a closed container demonstrated a slow flow can be generated simply due to the container having a sloping boundary surface This remarkable motion is generated as a result of the curvature of the lines of constant density near any sloping surface, which in turn enables a zero normal-flux condition on the density to be satisfied along that boundary. When the Rayleigh number is large (or equivalently Wunsch's parameter $R$ is small) this motion is concentrated in the near vicinity of the sloping surface, in a thin `buoyancy layer' that has many similarities to an Ekman layer in a rotating fluid.

A number of studies have since considered the consequences of this type of `diffusively-driven' flow in a semi-infinite domain, including in the deep ocean and with turbulent effects included. More recently, Page & Johnson (2008) described a steady linear theory for the broader-scale mass recirculation in a closed container and demonstrated that, unlike in previous studies, it is possible for the buoyancy layer to entrain fluid from that recirculation. That work has since been extended (Page & Johnson, 2009) to the nonlinear regime of the problem and some of the similarities to and differences from the linear case will be described in this talk. Simple and elegant analytical solutions in the limit as $R \to 0$ still exist in some situations, and they will be compared with numerical simulations in a tilted square container at small values of $R$. Further work on both the unsteady flow properties and the flow for other geometrical configurations will also be described.

Turbulence is characterised by three-dimensional unsteady fluid motion over a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. It is important in many problems of technological and scientific interest, such as drag reduction, energy production and climate prediction. In this talk, I will explain why turbulent flows are difficult to predict and describe a modern mathematical model of turbulence based on a random collection of fluid vortices.

The flows generated in many modern micro-devices possess very little convective inertia, however, they can be highly unsteady and exert substantial hydrodynamic forces on the device components. Typically these components exhibit some degree of compliance, which traditionally has been treated using simple one-dimensional elastic beam models. However, recent findings have suggested that three-dimensional effects can be important and, accordingly, we consider the elastohydrodynamic response of a rapidly oscillating three-dimensional elastic plate that is immersed in a viscous fluid. In addition, a preliminary model will be presented which incorporates the presence of a nearby elastic wall.

The unsteady flow of a viscous fluid through a curved pipe is a widely occuring and well studied problem. The stability of such flows, however, has largely been overlooked; this is in marked contrast to flow through a straight-pipe, examination of which forms a cornerstone of hydrodynamic stability theory. Importantly, however, flow through a curved pipe exhibits an array of flow structures that are simply not present in the zero curvature limit, and it is natural to expect these to substantially impact upon the flow's stability. By considering two very different kinds of flows through a curved pipe, we illustrate that this can indeed be the case.

Stable commutator length answers the question: "what is the simplest surface in a given space with prescribed boundary?" where "simplest" is interpreted in topological terms. This topological definition is complemented by several equivalent definitions - in group theory, as a measure of non-commutativity of a group; and in linear programming, as the solution of a certain linear optimization problem. On the topological side, scl is concerned with questions such as computing the genus of a knot, or finding the simplest 4-manifold that bounds a given 3-manifold. On the linear programming side, scl is measured in terms of certain functions called quasimorphisms, which arise from hyperbolic geometry (negative curvature) and symplectic geometry (causal structures). In these talks we will discuss how scl in free and surface groups is connected to such diverse phenomena as the existence of closed surface subgroups in graphs of groups, rigidity and discreteness of symplectic representations, bounding immersed curves on a surface by immersed subsurfaces, and the theory of multi- dimensional continued fractions and Klein polyhedra. Danny Calegari is the Richard Merkin Professor of Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology, and is one of the recipients of the 2009 Clay Research Award for his work in geometric topology and geometric group theory. He received a B.A. in 1994 from the University of Melbourne, and a Ph.D. in 2000 from the University of California, Berkeley under the joint supervision of Andrew Casson and William Thurston. From 2000 to 2002 he was Benjamin Peirce Assistant Professor at Harvard University, after which he joined the Caltech faculty; he became Richard Merkin Professor in 2007.

This presentation concerns the fluid-structure interaction (FSI) that occurs between a fluid flow and an arbitrarily deforming flexible boundary considered to be a flexible panel or a compliant coating that comprises the wetted surface of a marine vehicle. We develop and deploy an approach that is a hybrid of computational and theoretical techniques. The system studied is two-dimensional and linearised disturbances are assumed. Of particular novelty in the present work is the ability of our methods to extract a full set of fluid-structure eigenmodes for systems that have strong spatial inhomogeneity in the structure of the flexible wall.

We first present the approach and some results of the system in which an ideal, zero-pressure gradient, flow interacts with a flexible plate held at both its ends. We use a combination of boundary-element and finite-difference methods to express the FSI system as a single matrix equation in the interfacial variable. This is then couched in state-space form and standard methods used to extract the system eigenvalues. It is then shown how the incorporation of spatial inhomogeneity in the stiffness of the plate can be either stabilising or destabilising. We also show that adding a further restraint within the streamwise extent of a homogeneous panel can trigger an additional type of hydroelastic instability at low flow speeds. The mechanism for the fluid-to-structure energy transfer that underpins this instability can be explained in terms of the pressure-signal phase relative to that of the wall motion and the effect on this relationship of the added wall restraint.

We then show how the ideal-flow approach can be conceptually extended to include boundary-layer effects. The flow field is now modelled by the continuity equation and the linearised perturbation momentum equation written in velocity-velocity form. The near-wall flow field is spatially discretised into rectangular elements on an Eulerian grid and a variant of the discrete-vortex method is applied. The entire fluid-structure system can again be assembled as a linear system for a single set of unknowns - the flow-field vorticity and the wall displacements - that admits the extraction of eigenvalues. We then show how stability diagrams for the fully-coupled finite flow-structure system can be assembled, in doing so identifying classes of wall-based or fluid-based and spatio-temporal wave behaviour.

Ever since Sophus Lie around 1880, continuous groups of invariance transformations have been used to reduce variables and to construct special solutions of PDEs. I will outline the general ideas, then show some variations on the usual reduction algorithm that I have used to solve some practical nonlinear boundary value problems. Applications include soil-water flow, metal surface evolution and population genetics.

Jeffery–Hamel flows describe the steady two-dimensional flow of an incompressible viscous fluid between plane walls separated by an angle $\alpha$. They are often used to approximate the flow in domains of finite radial extent. However, whilst the base Jeffery–Hamel solution is characterised by a subcritical pitchfork bifurcation, studies in expanding channels of finite length typically find symmetry breaking via a supercritical bifurcation.

We use the finite element method to calculate solutions for flow in a two-dimensional wedge of finite length bounded by arcs of constant radii, $R_1$ and $R_2$. We present a comprehensive picture of the bifurcation structure and nonlinear states for a net radial outflow of fluid. We find a series of nested neutral curves in the Reynolds number-$\alpha$ plane corresponding to pitchfork bifurcations that break the midplane symmetry of the flow. We show that these finite domain bifurcations remain distinct from the similarity solution bifurcation even in the limit $R_2/R_1 \rightarrow \infty$.

We also discuss a class of stable steady solutions apparently related to a steady, spatially periodic, wave first observed by Tutty (1996). These solutions remain disconnected in our domain in the sense that they do not arise via a local bifurcation of the Stokes flow solution as the Reynolds number is increased.

Tissue engineering could be called 'the science of spare parts'. Although currently in its infancy, its long-term aim is to grow functional tissues and organs in vitro to replace those which have become defective through age, trauma or disease. Recent experiments have shown that mechanical interactions between cells and the materials in which they are grown have an important influence on tissue architecture, but in order to understand these effects, we first need to understand the mechanics of the gels themselves.

Many biological gels (e.g. collagen) used in tissue engineering have a fibrous microstructure which affects the way forces are transmitted through the material, and which in turn affects cell migration and other behaviours. I will present a simple continuum model of gel mechanics, based on treating the gel as a transversely isotropic viscous material. Two canonical problems are considered involving thin two-dimensional films: extensional flow, and squeezing flow of the fluid between two rigid plates. Neglecting inertia, gravity and surface tension, in each regime we can exploit the thin geometry to obtain a leading-order problem which is sufficiently tractable to allow the use of analytical methods. I discuss how these results could be exploited practically to determine the mechanical properties of real gels. If time permits, I will also talk about work currently in progress which explores the interaction between gel mechanics and cell behaviour.

Meshless methods such as vortex methods (VMs) and smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) schemes offer many advantages in fluid flow computations. Particle-based computations naturally adapt to complex flow geometries and so provide a high degree of computational efficiency. Also, particle based methods avoid CFL conditions because flow quantities are integrated along characteristics. There are many approaches to improving numerical methods, but one of the most effective routes is quantifying the error through the direct estimate of residual quantities. Understanding the residual for particle schemes requires a different approach than for meshless schemes but the rewards are significant. In this seminar, I will outline a general approach to understanding convergence that has been effective in creating high spatial accuracy vortex methods, and then I will discuss some recent investigations in the accuracy of diffusion operators used in SPH computations. Finally, I will provide some sample Navier-Stokes computations of high Reynolds number flows using BlobFlow, an open source implementation of the high precision vortex method.

Many complex datasets suffer from missing data, and interpolating these missing elements is a key task in data analysis. Moreover, it is often the case that we see only a linear combination of the desired measurements, not the measurements themselves. For instance, in network management, it is easy to count the traffic on a link, but harder to measure the end-to-end flows. Additionally, typical interpolation algorithms treat either the spatial, or the temporal components of data separately, but in many real datasets have strong spatio-temporal structure that we would like to exploit in reconstructing the missing data. In this talk I will describe a novel reconstruction algorithm that exploits concepts from the growing area of compressive sensing to solve all of these problems and more. The approach works so well on Internet traffic matrices that we can obtain a reasonable reconstruction with as much as 98% of the original data missing.

We show uniqueness up to sign of positive, orthogonal almost-Kahler structures on any non-scalar flat Kahler-Einstein surface. This is joint work with A. J. di Scala.

Research into two-dimensional laminar fluid mixing has enjoyed a renaissance in the last decade since the realisation that the Thurston–Nielsen theory of surface homeomorphisms can assist in designing efficient "topologically chaotic" batch mixers. In this talk I will survey some tools used in topological fluid kinematics, including braid groups, train-tracks, dynamical systems and topological index formulae. I will then make some speculations about topological chaos in three dimensions.

Bushfires occur regularly during summer in southern Australia, but only a few of these fires become iconic due to their effects, either in terms of loss of life or economic and social cost. Such events include Black Friday (1939), the Hobart fires (1967), Ash Wednesday (1983), the Canberra bushfires (2003), and most recently Black Saturday in February 2009. In most of these events the weather of the day was statistically extreme in terms of heat, (low) humidity, and wind speed, and in terms of antecedent drought. There are a number of reasons for conducting post-event analyses of the meteorology of these events. One is to identify any meteorological circulation systems or dynamic processes occurring on those days that might not be widely or hitherto recognised, to document these, and to develop new forecast or guidance products. The understanding and prediction of such features can be used in the short term to assist in effective management of fires and the safety of firefighters and in the medium range to assist preparedness for the onset of extreme conditions. The results of such studies can also be applied to simulations of future climates to assess the likely changes in frequency of the most extreme fire weather events, and their documentary records provide a resource that can be used for advanced training purposes. In addition, particularly for events further in the past, revisiting these events using reanalysis data sets and contemporary NWP models can also provide insights unavailable at the time of the events. Over the past few years the Bushfire CRC's Fire Weather and Fire Danger project in CAWCR has studied the mesoscale meteorology of a number of major fire events, including the days of Ash Wednesday 1983, the Dandenong Ranges fire in January 1997, the Canberra fires and the Alpine breakout fires in January 2003, the Lower Eyre Peninsula fires in January 2005 and the Boorabbin fire in December 2007-January 2008. Various aspects of these studies are described below, including the structures of dry cold frontal wind changes, the particular character of the cold fronts associated with the most damaging fires in southeastern Australia, and some aspects of how the vertical temperature and humidity structure of the atmosphere may affect the fire weather at the surface. These studies reveal much about these major events, but also suggest future research directions, and some of these will be discussed.

The sense of smell is important in nature, but the least well understood of our senses. A mathematical model of smell, which combines the transmission of volatile-organic-compound chemical signals (VOCs) on the wind, transduced by olfactory receptors in our noses into neural information, and assembled into our odour perception, is useful. Applications include regulations for odour nuisance, like German VDI protocols for calibrated noses, to the design of modern chemical sensors for extracting information from the environment and even for the perfume industry. This talk gives a broad overview of turbulent mixing in surface layers of the atmosphere, measurements of VOCs with PTR-MS (proton transfer reaction mass spectrometers), our noses, and integrated environmental models of the Alumina industry (a source of odour emissions) to help understand the science of smell.

Simulations in which the system of interest is essentially mimicked are termed explicit numerical simulations (ENS). Direct numerical simulation (DNS) of turbulence is a well known and long-standing example of ENS. Such simulations provide a basis for elucidating fundamentals in a way that is impossible experimentally and formulating and parameterizing engineering models with reduced experimentation. In this presentation, I will first outline the concept of ENS. I will then report a number of ENS-based studies of various multiphase fluid systems and flows in porous media. In the first of these studies, which is concerned with flow of suspensions in porous media accompanied by deposition, ENS is used to demonstrate the significant inadequacies of the classical trajectory models typically used for the study of such problems. In the second study, which is concerned with elucidating the change in binary droplet collision behaviour with Capillary number (Ca) and Reynolds number (Re), a range of collision scenarios are revealed as a function of Ca and Re and it appears that the boundaries between these scenarios in the Ca-Re space are not distinct but, rather, smeared. In the final study, it is shown that ENS an be used to predict ab initio the hydrodynamic properties of single phase flow through porous media from the Darcy to the turbulent regimes.

The no-slip boundary condition was considered to have been experimentally established for the flow of simple liquids over solid surfaces in the early 20th century. Nonetheless the refinement of a number of measurement techniques has recently led to the observation of nano- and microscale violations of the no-slip boundary condition by simple fluids flowing over non-wetting surfaces. However it is important to distinguish between intrinsic slip, which arises solely from the chemical interaction between the liquid and a homogeneous, atomically flat surface and effective slip, typically measured in macroscopic experiments, which emerges from the interaction of microscopic chemical heterogeneity, roughness and contaminants. Here we consider the role of both intrinsic and effective slip boundary conditions in nanoscale and microscale fluid flows using a theoretical approach, complemented by molecular dynamics simulations, and experimental evidence where available. Firstly, we consider nanoscale flows in small capillaries, including carbon nanotubes, where we have developed and solved a generalised Lucas-Washburn equation that incorporates slip to describe the uptake of droplets. We then consider the general problem of relating effective slip to microscopic intrinsic slip and roughness, and discuss several cases where we have been able to solve this problem analytically. Finally, we look at applications of these results to carbon nanotube growth, self-cleaning surfaces, catalysis, and putting insulation in your roof.

This paper builds on earlier work by Davis and Hobson (Mathematical Finance, 2007) giving model-free---except for a 'frictionless markets' assumption--- necessary and sufficient conditions for absence of arbitrage given a set of current-time put and call options on some underlying asset. Here we suppose that the prices of a set of put options, all maturing at the same time, are given and satisfy the conditions for consistency with absence of arbitrage. We now add a path-dependent option, specifically a weighted variance swap, to the set of traded assets and ask what are the conditions on its time-0 price under which consistency with absence of arbitrage is maintained. In the present work, we work under the extra modelling assumption that the underlying asset price process has continuous paths. In general, we find that there is always a non- trivial lower bound to the range of arbitrage-free prices, but only in the case of a corridor swap do we obtain a finite upper bound. In the case of, say, the vanilla variance swap, a finite upper bound exists when there are additional traded European options which constrain the left wing of the volatility surface in appropriate ways.

Horizontal convecton refers to flows driven by uneven heating on a horizontal forcing boundary. Flows exhibiting these characteristics are prevalent in nature, and include the North-South Hadley circulation within the atmosphere between warmer and more temperate latitudes, as well as ocean currents driven by non-uniform heating via solar radiation.

Here a model for these generic convection flows is established featuring a rectangular enclosure, insulated on the side and top walls, and driven by a linear temperature gradient applied along the bottom wall. Rayleigh number dependence of heat transfer through the forcing boundary is computed and compared with theory. Attention is given to transitions in the flow, including the development of unsteady flow and three-dimensional flow: the effect of these transitions on the Nusselt-Rayleigh number scaling exponents is described.

Let I(p,v) be Bourdon's building, the unique simply-connected 2-complex such that all 2-cells are regular right-angled hyperbolic p-gons, and the link at each vertex is the complete bipartite graph K_{v,v}. We investigate and mostly determine the set of triples (p,v,g) for which there is a discrete group acting on I(p,v) so that the quotient is a compact orientable surface of genus g. Surprisingly, the existence of such a quotient depends upon the value of v. The remaining cases lead to open questions in tessellations of surfaces and in number theory. We use elementary group theory, combinatorics, algebraic topology and number theory. This is joint work with David Futer.

Permeability is a key parameter important to a variety of applications in geological engineering and in the environmental geosciences. The conventional definition of Darcy flow enables the estimation of permeability at different levels of detail. This lecture will focus on the measurement of surface permeability characteristics of a large cuboidal block of Indiana Limestone, using a surface permeameter. The paper discusses the theoretical developments, the solution of the resulting triple integral equations and associated computational treatments that enable the mapping of the near surface permeability of the cuboidal region. This data combined with a kriging procedure is used to develop results for the permeability distribution at the interior of the cuboidal region. Upon verification of the absence of dominant pathways for fluid flow through the cuboidal region, estimates are obtained for the "Effective Permeability" of the cuboid using estimates proposed by Wiener, Landau and Lifschitz, King, Matheron, Journel et al., Dagan and others. The results of these estimates are compared with the geometric mean, derived form the computational estimates.

In this talk I will review existing analytical results for priority queueing systems with Poisson incoming flows, general service times and a single server which needs some (random) time to switch between requests of different priority. Specifically, I will discuss analytical results for the busy period and workload of such systems with a special structure of switchover times. The results related to the busy period can be seen as generalisations of the famous Kendall-Tak\'{a}cs functional equation for $M|G|1$: being formulated in terms of Laplace-Stieltjes transform, they represent systems of functional recurrent equations. I will present a methodology and algorithms of their numerical solution; the efficiency of these algorithms is achieved by acceleration of the numerical procedure of solving the classical Kendall-Tak\'{a}cs equation. At the end I will identify open problems with regard to such systems; these open problems are mainly related to the modelling of switchover times.

We consider two different position jump processes: (i) a random walk on a lattice (ii) the Euler scheme for the Smoluchowski differential equation. Both of these reduce to the diffusion equation as the time step and size of the jump tend to zero. We consider the problem of adding chemical reactions to these processes, both at a surface and in the bulk. We show how the "microscopic" parameters should be chosen to achieve the correct "macroscopic" reaction rate. This choice is found to depend on which stochastic model for diffusion is used.

The distribution of individual orbits of unipotent flows in homogeneous spaces are well understood thanks to the work work of Marina Ratner. It is conjectured that this property is preserved on restricting the times from the integers to primes, this being important in the study of prime numbers as well as in such dynamics. We review progress in understanding this conjecture, starting with Dirichlet (a finite system), Vinogradov (rotation of a circle or torus), Green and Tao (translation on a nilmanifold) and Ubis and Sarnak (horocycle flows in the semisimple case).

For steady flows, the boundaries of Lagrangian Coherent Structures are segments of manifolds connected to fixed points. In the general unsteady situation, these boundaries are time-varying manifolds of hyperbolic trajectories. Locating these boundaries, and attempting to meaningfully quantify fluid flux across them, is difficult since they are moving with time. This talk uses a newly developed tangential movement theory to locate these boundaries in nearly-steady compressible flows.

The problem of variables separation in the linear stability equations, which govern the disturbance behavior in viscous incompressible fluid flows, is discussed. Stability of some unsteady nonparallel three-dimensional flows (exact solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations) is studied via separation of variables using a semi-analytical, semi-numerical approach. In this approach, a solution with separated variables is defined in a new coordinate system which is sought together with the solution form. As the result, the linear stability problems are reduced to eigenvalue problems for ordinary differential equations which can be solved numerically. In some specific cases, the eigenvalue problems can be solved analytically. Those unique examples of exact (explicit) solution of the nonparallel unsteady flow stability problems provide a very useful test for methods used in the hydrodynamic stability theory. Exact solutions of the stability problems for some stagnation-type flows are presented.

The Weil-Petersson metric is an exciting metric on a space of simple plane curves. In this talk the speaker will introduce the shape space and demonstrate the connection with the Euler-Poincare equations on the group of diffeomorphisms (EPDiff). A numerical method for finding geodesics between two shapes will be demonstrated and applied to the surface of the hippocampus to study the effects of Alzheimer's disease. As another application the speaker will discuss how to do statistics on the shape space and what should be done to improve it.

Optical fibres are used extensively in modern telecommunications as they allow the transmission of information at high speeds. Microstructured optical fibres are a relatively new fibre design in which a waveguide for light is created by a series of air channels running along the length of the material. The flexibility of this design allows optical fibres to be created with adaptable (and previously unrealised) optical properties. However, the fluid flows that arise during fabrication can greatly distort the geometry, which can reduce the effectiveness of a fibre or render it useless. I will present an overview of the manufacturing process and highlight the difficulties. I will then focus on surface-tension driven deformation of the macroscopic version of the fibre extruded from a reservoir of molten glass, occurring during fabrication, which will be treated as a two-dimensional Stokes flow problem. I will outline two different complex-variable numerical techniques for solving this problem along with comparisons of the results, both to other models and to experimental data.

Given a compact Riemann surface X and a point p in X, we construct a holomorphic function without critical points on the punctured (algebraic) Riemann surface R=X-p which is of finite order at the point p. In the case at hand this improves the 1967 theorem of Gunning and Rossi to the effect that every open Riemann surface admits a noncritical holomorphic function, but without any particular growth condition. (Joint work with Takeo Ohsawa.)

In this talk, I will describe a mechanism for determining instability of standing wave solutions to a class of inhomogeneous nonlinear Schrodinger (NLS) equations. The inhomogeneity in this case means that the equations will spatially alternate between NLS and the so-called Gross-Pitaevskii equation. Such equations are useful in 1-D models of Bose-Einstein Condensates (BECs). The mechanism is inherently topological and therefore robust, leading to its application to a number of different soliton solutions, such as gap solitons, surface gap solitons, and dark soliton among others.

Motivated by certain tea room discussions, I am going to (attempt to) model the flow of a viscous fluid under gravity over conical topography. The method used is 'Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics' (SPH), which is an easy-to-use but perhaps limited-accuracy computational method. The model could be extended to include solidification and thermodynamic effects that can also be implemented within the framework of SPH, and this has the obvious practical application to the modelling of the coverage of ice cream with ice magic, I mean, lava flows. If I fail to achieve this within the next 4 weeks, I will have to go through a talk on SPH that I gave during honours instead.

Spatial-point data sets, generated from a wide range of physical systems and mathematical models, can be analyzed by counting the number of objects in equally sized bins. We find that the bin counts are related to the Polya distribution. New indexes are developed which quantify whether or not a spatial data set is at its most evenly distributed state. Using three case studies (Lagrangian fluid particles in chaotic laminar flows, cellular automata agents in discrete models, and biological cells within colonies), we calculate the indexes and predict the spatial-state of the system.

In this talk, methane (CH4) adsorption is investigated on both graphite and in the region between two aligned single-walled carbon nanotubes, which we refer to as the groove site. The Lennard–Jones potential function and the continuous approximation is exploited to determine surface binding energies between a single CH4 molecule and graphite and between a single CH4 and two aligned single-walled carbon nanotubes. The modelling indicates that for a CH4 molecule interacting with graphite, the binding energy of the system is minimized when the CH4 carbon is 3.83 angstroms above the surface of the graphitic carbon, while the binding energy of the CH4–groove site system is minimized when the CH4 carbon is 5.17 angstroms away from the common axis shared by the two aligned single-walled carbon nanotubes. These results confirm the current view that for larger groove sites, CH4 molecules in grooves are likely to move towards the outer surfaces of one of the single-walled carbon nanotubes. The results presented in this talk are computationally efficient and are in good agreement with experiments and molecular dynamics simulations, and show that CH4 adsorption on graphite and groove surfaces is more favourable at lower temperatures and higher pressures.

In complex geometry a manifold is Stein if there are, in a certain sense, "many" holomorphic maps from the manifold into C^n. While this has long been well understood, a fruitful definition of the dual notion has until recently been elusive. In Oka theory, a manifold is Oka if it satisfies several equivalent definitions, each stating that the manifold has "many" holomorphic maps into it from C^n. Related to this is the geometric condition of ellipticity due to Gromov, who showed that it implies a complex manifold is Oka. We present recent contributions to three open questions involving elliptic and Oka manifolds. We show that affine quotients of C^n are elliptic, and combine this with an example of Margulis to construct new elliptic manifolds of interesting homotopy types. It follows that every open Riemann surface properly acyclically embeds into an elliptic manifold, extending an existing result for open Riemann surfaces with abelian fundamental group.

We compare spectral and wavelet estimators of the response amplitude operator (RAO) of a linear system, with various input signals and added noise scenarios. The comparison is based on a model of a heaving buoy wave energy device (HBWED), which oscillates vertically as a single mode of vibration linear system. HBWEDs and other single degree of freedom wave energy devices such as the oscillating wave surge convertors (OWSC) are currently deployed in the ocean, making single degree of freedom wave energy devices important systems to both model and analyse in some detail. However, the results of the comparison relate to any linear system. It was found that the wavelet estimator of the RAO offers no advantage over the spectral estimators if both input and response time series data are noise free and long time series are available. If there is noise on only the response time series, only the wavelet estimator or the spectral estimator that uses the cross-spectrum of the input and response signals in the numerator should be used. For the case of noise on only the input time series, only the spectral estimator that uses the cross-spectrum in the denominator gives a sensible estimate of the RAO. If both the input and response signals are corrupted with noise, a modification to both the input and response spectrum estimates can provide a good estimator of the RAO. However, a combination of wavelet and spectral methods is introduced as an alternative RAO estimator. The conclusions apply for autoregressive emulators of sea surface elevation, impulse, and pseudorandom binary sequences (PRBS) inputs. However, a wavelet estimator is needed in the special case of a chirp input where the signal has a continuously varying frequency.

Problems involving wave propagation through systems composed of arrays of scattering sources embedded in some background medium will be considered. For example, in a fluids setting, the background medium is the open ocean surface and the scatterers are floating bodies, such as wave energy devices. Waves propagate in very different ways if the system is structured or disordered. If the disorder is random the problem is to determine the `effective' wave propagation properties by considering the ensemble average over all possible realisations of the system. I will talk about semi-analytical (i.e. low numerical cost) approaches to determining the effective properties.

We aim to solve the advection-diffusion-reaction equation on the surface of a sphere. In order to do this we will be required to utilise spherical harmonics, a set of solutions to Laplace's equation in spherical coordinates. Upon solving the equations, we aim to find a set of parameters that cause a localised concentration to be maintained in the flow, referred to as a hotspot. In this talk I will discuss the techniques that are required to numerically solve this problem and the issues that occur/how to deal with these issues when searching for hotspot solutions.

Electrokinetic techniques are used to gather specific information about concentrated dispersions such as electronic inks, mineral processing slurries, pharmaceutical products and biological fluids (e.g. blood). But, like most experimental techniques, intermediate quantities are measured, and consequently the method relies explicitly on theoretical modelling to extract the quantities of experimental interest. A self-consistent cell-model theory of electrokinetics can be used to determine the electrical conductivity of a dense suspension of spherical colloidal particles, and thereby determine the quantities of interest (such as the particle surface potential). The numerical predictions of this model compare well with published experimental results. High frequency asymptotic analysis of the cell-model leads to some interesting conclusions.

The analysis of turbulence in transient flows has applications across a broad range of fields. We use the flow of fluid in a toroidal container as a paradigm for studying the complex dynamics due to this turbulence. To explore the dynamics of our system, we exploit the numerical capabilities of semtex; a quadrilateral spectral element DNS code. Rainbows result.

It is a well-known fact that the methods of complex analysis provide great advantage in studying physical problems involving a harmonic field satisfying Laplace's equation. One example is in ideal fluid mechanics (infinite Reynolds number) where the absence of viscosity, and the assumption of zero vorticity, mean that it is possible to introduce a so-called complex potential -- an analytic function from which all physical quantities of interest can be inferred. In the opposite limit of zero Reynolds number flows which are slow and viscous and the governing fields are not harmonic it is much less common to employ the methods of complex analysis even though they continue to be relevant in certain circumstances. This talk will give an overview of a variety of problems involving slow viscous Stokes flows where complex analysis can be usefully employed to gain theoretical insights. A number of example problems will be considered including the locomotion of low-Reynolds-number micro-organisms and micro-robots, the friction properties of superhydrophobic surfaces in microfluidics and problems of viscous sintering and the manufacture of microstructured optic fibres (MOFs).

The study of flow in open helically-wound channels has application to many natural and industrial flows. We will consider laminar flow down helically-wound channels of rectangular cross section and with small torsion, in which the fluid depth is small. Assuming a steady-state flow that is independent of position along the axis of the channel, the flow solution may be determined in the two-dimensional cross section of the channel. A thin-film approximation yields explicit expressions for the fluid velocity in terms of the free-surface shape. The latter satisfies an interesting non-linear ordinary differential equation that, for a channel of rectangular cross section, has an analytical solution. The predictions of the thin-film model are shown to be in good agreement with much more computationally intensive solutions of the small-helix-torsion Navier-Stokes equations. This work has particular relevance to spiral particle separators used in the minerals processing industry. Early work on modelling of particle-laden thin-film flow in spiral channels will also be discussed.

Suppose that the global eigenvalue distributions of two large random matrices A and B are known. It is a remarkable fact that, generically, the eigenvalue distribution of A + B and (if A and B are positive definite) A*B are uniquely determined from only the eigenvalue distributions of A and B; i.e., no information about eigenvectors are required. These operations on eigenvalue distributions are described by free probability theory. We construct a numerical toolbox that can efficiently and reliably calculate these operations with spectral accuracy, by exploiting the complex analytical framework that underlies free probability theory.

Buoyancy-affected turbulence represents a significant challenge to our understanding, yet it dominates many important flows that occur in the ocean and atmosphere. The presentation will highlight some recent progress in the characterisation, modelling and prediction of buoyancy-affected turbulence using direct and large-eddy simulations, along with implications for the characterisation of mixing in the ocean and the low-cloud feedback in the atmosphere. Specifically, direct numerical simulation data of stratified turbulence will be employed to highlight the importance of boundaries in the characterisation of turbulent mixing in the ocean. Then, a subgrid-scale model that captures the anisotropic character of stratified mixing will be developed for large-eddy simulation of buoyancy-affected turbulence. Finally, the subgrid-scale model is utilised to perform a systematic large-eddy simulation investigation of the archetypal low-cloud regimes, from which the link between the lower-tropospheric stability criterion and the cloud fraction interpreted.