Invited by the organization committee, Prof. Wen delivered a keynote lecture, titled "Multiscale Study of Flow and Heat Transfer across Interfaces", at ENCIT-2024, the 20th Brazilian Congress of Thermal Sciences and Engineering, 10-14 November 2024, in Foz do Iguacu, Brazil.
Interface is everywhere, and transport phenomenon at the interface or across an interface often dictates how an engineering system performs, including energy, manufacturing, aerospace engineering, process intensification, medicine, and beyond. Fluid flow and heat transfer occurs fundamentally in different scales, ranging from molecular / atomic level carrier transport to bulk energy and mass transfer at the engineering scale. For both reacting and non-reacting interfaces, the processes at the nanoscale could affect the performance at the macroscale significantly. It has always been a big challenge to bridge these two scales via appropriate methods that allows fast simulation while with adequate molecular level input.
Different coupling strategies, such as MD derived peripteries coupling, heterogeneous multiscale modelling (HMM) and domain decomposition (DD) have been developed. For thermophysical properties predictions, equilibrium molecular dynamics (EMD) has been widely used, which allows the predication of size-dependent properties, hence the transport phenomenon near or across an interface under quasi-equilibrium conditions possible. For an interface involving complex chemical reactions, reactive molecular simulation (RMD)-CFD coupling approach has been recently proposed, and developed to capture various reactions across interface for macroscopic heat transfer prediction. This talk reports our recent development in multiscale coupling and simulation of transport processes across different interfaces. Examples studies of multiscale flow and heat transfer across reacting and non-reacting interfaces involving different phase change phenomena are reported. The limitation, and challenges of our multiscale approach, as well as perspective outlook of future research is discussed
During the conference period Prof. Wen met many old and new friends in Brazil, and strengthened his long time connection and collaboration with Brazilian scientists.