Cosserat’s
media differ from Cauchy’s media of classical continuum mechanics by admitting
infinitesimal deformations besides the infinitesimal translations. In this case
a couple stress tensor has to be considered additionally to the classical
Cauchy stress tensor. The restriction of
the infinitesimal deformations to allow only rotations gives rise to a
simplified model known as micropolar (theory). When describing fluids motion the
kinematical description is augmented by a vector field, known as
micro-rotations or spin, taking into account for the infinitesimal rotations,
and an additional equation for the balance of the angular momentum, where the couple
stress comes in. With
respect to applications this model lends itself to the description of
suspensions of nano-sized particles. Two technologies recently targeted by our
group are: Nanofluids and Ferrohydrodynamics (FHD). The interest in the former
is related to its heat transfer properties. The later, a suspension of magnetic
nano-sized particles, is more challenging due to its multi-physics nature
coupling fluid mechanics and magnetism, and has great potential in biomedical
applications. Regarding implementation, our group is continuously developing
and extending an in-house parallel code based on the isogeometric analysis
concept, providing discretization capabilities to work with such complex and
multi-physics models. The
internship will have the opportunity to work and contribute with other members of
the project focusing in his/her abilities and interests. Possible contributions are: implementing
those complex models, parallel programming (our code are all developed with the
PETSc library), verification and validation of the models, but are not limited
to those.