Amir Pahlavan
Yale University
Seminar Information
~ Meeting ID: 953 4372 0997
We observe the formation of bubbles and drops on a daily basis, from dripping faucets to raindrops entraining bubbles on the surface of a lake. The ubiquity of these phenomena often masks their fascinating underlying nonlinear dynamics. In this talk, I will discuss two problems involving bubbles and drops.
I will first report on the surprising observation that confinement makes the pinch-off of a bubble a universal process, as opposed to the unconfined case, where pinch-off is sensitive to the details of the experimental setting.
In the second part, I will discuss our observations on the evaporation of binary-mixture droplets and show how the dominance of surface tension at small scales can play a dual role, leading to strong shape modulations instead of keeping the drops spherical.
Amir Pahlavan joins the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Material Science at Yale University as an Assistant Professor in July 2021. He earned his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from MIT in 2018, where he studied interfacial flows and instabilities in confined environments with Ruben Juanes and Gareth McKinley. He then joined Princeton University as a Postdoctoral Researcher, where he studied interfacial transport phenomena and phase change in multicomponent mixtures with Howard Stone. His research focuses on physicochemical hydrodynamics of interfacial transport phenomena in complex and disordered environments, drawing inspiration from a broad range of natural phenomena and technological applications, from transport of nutrients in plants to water desalination and CO2 sequestration.