The diseases of cardiovascular system and the respiratory system have been the second and third killers causing deaths in Hong Kong. In this stressful civilized world, the prevalence and incidence of these diseases increased prominently which arouse our concern on the theories behind the pathological conditions. This report will focus on the biofluid mechanics in the large artery and in the upper airway. Thoracic aortic dissection, characterized by the tearing in the middle layer of vessel wall, is a catastrophic vascular disorder. The wall of the newly formed channel, the false lumen, is weakened and prone to aortic events. Endovascular repair is a minimally invasive technique for treating dissection patients. The biomechanical factors and the length of endograft were studied by computational fluid dynamics. Two geometrical factors showed a significant impact on the backflow in the false lumen. A larger false lumen and a larger distal tear size greatly affected the extent of thrombosis in the false lumen. It made the false lumen under a higher risk of vessel rupture. The computational prediction also demonstrated a more stable hemodynamic condition in the model with a longer endograft. These results provide important information for the clinicians to propose the surgical procedures and to improve the design of endografts. Airway obstruction is a common breathing disorder but it is always underdiagnosed. Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and different dentofacial deformities are two pathological conditions in which the patients have the abnormal sizes of airways. Computational fluid dynamic was employed in both conditions with patient–specific models. In the part of OSA, pre– and post–operative models were studied. The dimensions and flow resistance of the upper airway showed a significant improvement after mandibular distraction. The percentage of stenosis and the flow resistance was reduced by 27.3% and 40.7% respectively. For the patients in three facial skeletal deformity groups, the cross–sectional area and the flow resistance were compared. The patients with Class II deformity had the smallest retroglossal and retroplatal dimensions as well as the greatest flow resistance. The results confirmed the effectiveness of mandibular distraction and also provide valuable implications for the clinicians on the treatment planning, particularly for the Class II subjects. / published_or_final_version / Mechanical Engineering / Master / Master of Philosophy

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This dissertation considers the effect of measuring randomly varying local hydraulic conductivity K(x) on one's ability to predict transient flow within bounded domains, driven by random sources, initial head distribution, and boundary functions. The first part of this work extends the steady state nonlocal formalism by Neuman and Orr [1992] in order to obtain the prediction of local hydraulic head h(x, t) and Darcy flux q(x, t) by means of their ensemble moments <h(x, t)> (c) and <q(x, t)>(c)conditioned on measurements of K(x). These predictors satisfy a deterministic flow equation which contains a nonlocal in space and time term called a "residual flux". As a result, <q(x, t)>(c) is nonlocal and non-Darcian so that an effective hydraulic conductivity K(c) does not generally exist. It is shown analytically that, with the exception of several specific cases, the well known requirement of "slow time-space variation" in uniform mean hydraulic gradient is essential for the existence of K(c). In a subsequent chapter, under this assumption, we develop analytical expressions for the effective hydraulic conductivity for flow in a three dimensional, mildly heterogeneous, statistically anisotropic porous medium of both infinite extent and in the presence of randomly prescribed Dirichlet and Neumann boundaries. Of a particular interest is the transient behavior of K(c) and its sensitivity to degree of statistical anisotropy and domain size. In a bounded domain, K(c) (t) decreases rapidly from the arithmetic mean K(A) at t = 0 toward the effective hydraulic conductivity corresponding to steady state flow, K(sr), K(c), exhibits similar behavior as a function of the dimensionless separation distance ρ between boundaries. At ρ = 0, K(c) = K(A) and rapidly decreases towards an asymptotic value obtained earlier for an infinite domain by G. Dagan. Our transient nonlocal formalism in the Laplace space allows us to analyze the impact of other than slow time-variations on the prediction of <q(x, t)>(c),. Analyzing several functional dependencies of mean hydraulic gradient, we find that this assumption is heavily dependent on the (relaxation) time-scale of the particular problem. Finally, we formally extend our results to strongly heterogeneous porous media by invoking the Landau-Lifshitz conjecture.

Dissolved organic contaminants that decrease the surface tension of water (surfactants) can have an effect on unsaturated flow through porous media due to the dependence of capillary pressure on surface tension. One and two-dimensional (1D, 2D) laboratory experiments and numerical simulations were conducted to study surfactant-induced unsaturated flow. The 1D experiments investigated differences in surfactant-induced flow as a function of contaminant mobility. The flow in a system contaminated with a high solubility, mobile surfactant, butanol, was much different than in a system contaminated with a sparingly soluble, relatively immobile surfactant, myristyl alcohol (MA). Because surface tension depression caused by MA was confined to the original source zone, the MA system was modeled using a standard unsaturated flow model (HYDRUS-1D) by assigning separate sets of hydraulic functions to the initially clean and source zones. To simulate the butanol system, HYDRUS-1D was modified to incorporate surfactant concentration-dependent changes to the moisture content-pressure head and unsaturated hydraulic conductivity functions. Following the 1D study, a two-dimensional flow cell (2.4 x 1.5 x 0.1 m) was used to investigate the infiltration of a surfactant contaminant plume from a point source on the soil surface, through the vadose zone, and toward a shallow aquifer. Above the top of the capillary fringe the advance of the surfactant solution caused a drainage front that radiated from the point source. Upon reaching the capillary fringe, the drainage front caused a localized depression of the capillary fringe and eventually a new capillary fringe height was established. Horizontal transport of surfactant in the depressed capillary fringe caused the propagation of a wedge-shaped drainage front in the downgradient direction. The numerical model HYDRUS-2D was modified to account for surfactant concentration-dependent effects on the unsaturated hydraulic functions and was successfully used to simulate the surfactant infiltration experiment. The extensive propagation of the drying front and the effect of vadose zone drainage on contaminant breakthrough time demonstrate the potential importance of considering surface tension effects on unsaturated flow and transport in systems containing surface-active organic contaminants or in systems where surfactants are used for remediation of the vadose zone or unconfined aquifers.

The main objective of this thesis is to study and investigate the dynamics and stability of cantilevered structures subjected to internal, external, or simultaneous internal and external axial flows. This was accomplished, in some cases, by deriving the linear equations of motion using a Newtonian approach and, in other cases, by making the necessary modifications to existing theoretical models. The continuous cantilevered systems were then discretized using the Galerkin method in order to determine their complex eigenfrequencies. Moreover, numerous experiments were performed to compare and validate, or otherwise, the theoretical models proposed. More specifically, the four cantilevered systems studied were the following: (i) a pipe conveying fluid that is fitted with a stabilizing end-piece, which suppresses flutter by blocking the straight-through exit of flow at the downstream end; (ii) a pipe aspirating fluid, which flutters at low flow velocities in its first mode; (iii) a free-clamped cylinder (i.e. with the upstream end free and the downstream end clamped) in confined axial flow, which also flutters at low flow velocities in its first mode and eventually develops a buckling instability; and (iv) a pipe subjected to internal flow, which after exiting the pipe is transformed to a confined counter-current annular flow, that becomes unstable by flutter too.

Ice accretion is a purely unsteady phenomenon that is presently approximated by most icing codes using quasi-steady modeling. The accuracy of ice prediction is thus directly related to the arbitrarily prescribed time span during which the impact of ice growth on both flow and droplets is neglected. The objective of this work is to remove this limitation by implementing a cost-effective unsteady approach. This is done by fully coupling, in time, a diphasic flow (interacting air and droplet particles) with the ice accretion model. The two-phase flow is solved using the Navier-Stokes and Eulerian droplet equations with dual-time stepping in order to improve computational time. The ice shape is either obtained from the conservation of mass and energy within a thin film layer for glaze and mixed icing conditions, or from a mass balance between water droplets impingement and mass flux of ice for rime icing conditions. The iced surface being constantly displaced in time, Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian terms are added to the governing equations to account for mesh movement. Moreover, surface smoothing techniques are developed to prevent degradation of the iced-surface geometric discretization. For rime ice, the numerical results clearly show that the new full unsteady modeling improves the accuracy of ice prediction, compared to the quasi-steady approach, while in addition ensuring time span independence. The applicability of the unsteady icing model for predicting glaze ice accretion is also demonstrated by coupling the diphasic model to the Shallow Water Icing Model. A more rigorous analysis reveals that this model requires the implementation of local surface roughness and that previous quasi-steady validations cannot be carried out using a small number of shots, therefore the need for unsteady simulation.

Even though the power of supercomputers has increased extraordinarily, there is still an insatiable need for more advanced multi-disciplinary CFD simulations in the aircraft analysis and design fields. A particular current interest is in the realistic three-dimensional fully viscous turbulent flow simulation of the highly non-linear aspects of aero-icing. This highly complex simulation is still computationally too demanding in industry, especially when several runs, such as parametric studies, are needed. In order to make such compute-intensive simulations more affordable, this work presents a reduced order modeling approach, based on the "Proper Orthogonal Decomposition", (POD), method to predict a wider swath of flow fields and ice shapes based on a limited number of "snapshots" obtained from complete high-fidelity CFD computations. The procedure of the POD approach is to first decompose the fields into modes, using a limited number of full-calculations snapshots, and then to reconstruct the field and/or ice shapes using those decomposed modes for other conditions, leading to reduced order calculations. The use of the POD technique drastically reduces the computational cost and can provide a more complete map of the performance degradation of an iced aircraft over a wide range of flight and weather conditions.

This work is concerned with the characterization of slowly moving fluids and was carried out on the flow of water through a narrow sedimentation tank. Dispersion in the type of flow structure involved is caused mainly by the presence of large eddies and, due to the fact that shear stresses are small, these eddies persist for a considerable period of time. Two flow models are presented : The first model assumes the X- Y- velocity component pair to form a discrete state Markov process in time and dispersion equations for the mean concentration at a point, the variance as well as concentration cross correlations are generated. In the second model the velocity fluctuation components are assumed to be independent, time-stationary Markov processes with normal probability density functions. The stochastic differential equation describing dispersion of tracer is formulated with and without the effect of molecular diffusion and solutions to both cases are presented. Comparison of the model with experimental data obtained from tracer and anemometer measurements show that the model is capable of describing mean dispersion in a relatively small region of the tank and that the tracer experiments were insensitive to molecular diffusion. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1970.