Research profle of a TACC scientist who studies a special fuid domain

Shear-thinning may sound like something done to

overly woolly sheep, but in the world of fuid dynam-
ics it is the behavior of a certain class of fuids, like
ketchup and, more importantly, blood, that become
runnier and less viscous as they fow in response to
an applied force.
Understanding the physics of such fuids is impor-
tant in many felds, says Dr. William L. Barth, TACC
Research Associate. The class includes a lot of indus-
trial lubricants, many fuids that are pumped into oil
wells to improve oil recovery, and some fuids like
blood that are important in biology. Barth is a scien-
tist at TACC whose computations are shedding new
light on the behavior of shear-thinning fuids while
also exercising and extending the capacities of high-
performance computers
The pictures here come from several of Barths recent
calculations, most of which were done this year for
his Ph.D. dissertation at UT Austin under the direc-
tion of Dr. Graham Carey of the Institute for Compu-
tational and Engineering Sciences (ICES). The dis-
sertation, Simulation of Non-Newtonian Fluids on
Workstation Clusters, earned Barth his doctorate in
May 2004, but the studies began with a benchmark
contest for a conference held in May 2001.
Bills interest in computational fuid dynamics and
high-performance computing were well suited to this
type of study, Carey says. Surprisingly, the behav-
ior of shear-thinning fuids, while easy to describe
qualitatively or observe empirically, is extraordinarily
complex and difcult to capture in a computational
fuid dynamics model. Over the past several years,
I found that I needed to pull together a number of
recently developed computational techniques, and
I needed a tremendous amount of computational
power just to begin to atack some of these problems,
Barth says.
Newtonian and non-Newtonian
As background to Barths study, it is worth noting
that fuid dynamics covers a lot of territory. Of the
normal solid-liquid-gas phases of mater, the liquids
and the gases are usually treated computationally as
fuids. Some of the solids exhibit plastic, fuid be-
havior, too (ductile metals, for example). The formal
mathematics of fuid dynamics even reaches out to
encompass the behavior of plasmas (ionized gases)
and the strange laboratory constructs called Bose-
Einstein condensates: collections of atoms trapped at
temperatures close to absolute zero.
With such a wide range of targets comes a pano-
ply of properties used to classify the kinds of fuids
and their ways of fowing. An important property
is viscosity, a measure of the resistance of a fuid to
deformation under shear stress (any force that tends
to change the shape of the material): the thicker the
fuid, the higher its viscosity. If the viscosity does not
change as the shear stress is applied, a fuid is said to
be Newtonian. Water and air are both Newtonian
fuids.
Non-Newtonian fuids are those whose viscosity
does change under a shear stress. The behavior of
such fuids (and of Newtonian fuids as well) may
depend also on whether other stresses include heating
or cooling and on how long a stress is applied. The
apparent viscosity of ketchup, for example, decreases
with the duration of the stress--the harder and longer
you pound on the botom of the botle, the more likely
a spurt of runny ketchup will be your reward. Such
fuids are classifed as shear-thinning fuids. There
are several varieties of these, classifed by other prop-
erties like response to heating or applied pressure, or
elastic behavior.
The classifcation of fuid types comes in the main
from laboratory experiments, Barth notes. These are
Page 1 of 4
Texas Advanced Computing Center | Feature Story
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Secrets of Shear Thinning
added complexity of these models and the need to
capture detailed fow structures accurately also make
this an area where parallel high performance comput-
ing is particularly appropriate.
Solution Strategies
The fnite-element code MGF was used to solve
Barths non-Newtonian problems also. The fnite-ele-
ment method is a technique for obtaining solutions to
a wide variety of problems in engineering and other
disciplines. It proceeds by taking the domain under
study, for example, a volume of fuid being heated in
a box, and discretizing it: dividing it into litle do-
mains, often triangles (in two dimensions) or tetra-
hedra or hexahedra (in three). The variation of some
feld variable (fuid velocity in our example) across
a single small element will have some simple form,
and one can write a mathematical expression for that
variation. Depending on the way in which the overall
stresses are applied, each of the other elements in the
problem will have similar or only slightly diferent
expressions.
The computer can keep track of all of the unknowns
for all of the variables in the whole system and work
to solve it as a simultaneous-equation system, using
linear algebra. In our example, what would emerge is
a picture of the fow of the fuid in the box over time.
Visualization techniques can bring out and emphasize
the salient physical processes.
The art in using the fnite-element method in a way
that leads to straightforward and experimentally test-
able conclusions, particularly on massively parallel
computational systems, consists in fnding ways to
do the linear algebra more efciently. Barth worked
to assemble a variety of solution strategies, includ-
ing selecting a time-integration scheme for the time-
dependent problems and determining the appropriate
domain-decomposition approach to assign parts of
problems to multiple processors. This required much
in the way of mathematical derivation of the spe-
cifc equations for solution. He then chose a solution
scheme and appropriate preconditioners--computer
codes that transform the algebraic matrices into
equivalent but more easily solved matrices.
Finally, he simplifed the input procedure by add-
ing a dial-an-operator interface as a front end for
initializing the MGF code. This last efort, a project
often aimed at deriving empirical ways of predicting
fuid behavior or at describing fuid behavior in very
special situations (e.g., lubricants for roller bearings).
The computational simulation of fuid behavior has
for the most part proceeded in parallel, but generally
from physical frst principles and without reference to
experiment. One of the objectives of the Carey group
and of Barth in his research was to fnd new ways to
foster the interaction of experiment and simulation.
Simulating Fluid Behavior
Thus Carey and Barth were surprised and pleased to
note that the call for a major international conference
on computational heat transfer included a bench-
mark contest that ofered a chance to match experi-
ment and simulation. What was remarkable about
it, Barth says, was that the experiment that we were
to match, involving natural, buoyancy-driven convec-
tion of a Newtonian fuid--air, actually--in a cubical
box, heated from below and cooled from above, was
carefully conducted to supply all the parameters a
modeler would need to build a simulation of the same
experiment. Instrumentation all over the experi-
mental system supplied not only measurements of
internal changes in the air mass but also boundary
conditions--changes at the edges and sides of the
system.
Barth and several members of other groups brought
computational solutions to the computational heat
transfer conference (CHT01). I used our fnite-ele-
ment fuid dynamics code called MGF, Barth says.
MGF stands for microgravity fow and was origi-
nally writen by the Carey group to validate space
shutle experiments, but it is widely applicable to
fuid problems on Earth as well as in space.
The MGF simulation of the Newtonian benchmark
was so successful that the obvious next step was to
simulate the way a non-Newtonian fuid would be-
have under the same experimental conditions, Barth
says. This became the topic of his dissertation.
Professor Carey sums up the problem this way.
Studies of coupled heat and fuid fow have been
almost exclusively confned to Newtonian fuid mod-
els, he says. But many industrial and naturally oc-
curring fuids of great interest to society require more
complex non-Newtonian models and ofer a rich area
for fundamental phenomenological fow studies. The
Page 2 of 4
Texas Advanced Computing Center | Feature Story
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Barth worked on for several years with a research
scientist in the Carey group, Robert McLay, allows the
MGF user to input linearized equations in a language
resembling the LaTeX math-typeseting language that
is widely used in scientifc publications, and it greatly
increased the versatility and ease of use of the MGF
code.
Computational Results
My main aim in solving a variety of diferent cases
for my dissertation was to obtain high-quality com-
putational results, Barth says, because these could
then be used as benchmarks for experiment and for
other simulation codes. The good experimental results
obtained for natural convection of a Newtonian fuid
motivated a new atempt to increase confdence in
computer simulations for coupled heat-transfer prob-
lems in non-Newtonian fuids.
Barth proceeded in careful stages. He focused on two
non-Newtonian, shear-thinning fuids, one called a
Powell-Eyring fuid and the other an extended
Williamson fuid, which difer slightly in the way in
which their viscosities change under stress. The two
classes of shear-thinning fuid correspond to varieties
of dilute suspensions, including biological fuids like
blood.
He frst solved two internal pipe fow problems
to study the behavior of the fuids without the infu-
ence of thermal efects. These cases of fow through a
straight, cylindrical pipe were readily comparable to
the well known Newtonian cases, and they highlight-
ed the shear-thinning aspects of the two fuids under
a range of ratios of velocity to viscosity (Reynolds
numbers). This also gave Barth an idea of how much
more intensive the calculations would be for the
non-Newtonian fuids, especially at higher Reynolds
number; in these simple cases, solution required two
to four times as much iteration.
The next step was to calculate how the fuids re-
sponded to pressure-driven fow in a branched pipe
(see Figure 3). The geometry is of interest because of
its relevance to branching pipe fows in engineering
and also biology--think of blood fowing in branch-
ing veins and arteries, Barth says. Under increased
pressure, the non-Newtonian Powell-Eyring fuid
develops a strong internal twisting current, with some
recirculation upstream. Similar recirculations develop
in the extended Williamson fuid at even greater pres-
sures. An ability to quantify and predict these behav-
iors could ultimately be of value in medical practice
as well as in many civil engineering projects.
More Difcult Cases
Now Barth was ready to tackle the CHT01 benchmark
problem with the geometry given in Figure 2 above
and a non-Newtonian fuid. The problem of natural
convection has a long history in computational fuid
dynamics. It was posed as a two-dimensional prob-
lem for comparison exercises as early as 1979. But
there were no good experimental results to compare
with calculations, for obvious reasons: it was extreme-
ly difcult to set up even a quasi-two-dimensional
experiment from which good measurements could be
taken.
Thus, the three-dimensional experiment presented at
CHT01 was not only a benchmark, but also a land-
mark in the feld. The extension of this 3-D Newto-
nian problem to non-Newtonian fuids now opens
up a broad space for further experimentation. Barth
conducted hundreds of simulations to explore the
complex parameter space with changing boundary
conditions and varying internal distributions of tem-
perature, pressure, viscosity, and other measurable
quantities.
As the picture here and at the top of this article il-
lustrate, the behavior of the non-Newtonian fuids is
complex. I see it best by thinking in terms of the heat
fux, Barth says. The rising column of heated fuid
is smaller in diameter and the upward velocity of the
fuid is greater in the center of the box, with a broader
return circulation along the sides. What is interesting
is that, over time and under the higher temperatures,
the non-Newtonian regime becomes frst periodic,
then metastable and aperiodic, not quite chaotic but
never in equilibrium or a steady state. The simula-
tions cover the evolution of the system over about
thirty minutes of real time, and further investigation
with longer simulations would be required to deter-
mine the ultimate evolution of the non-Newtonian
fuid. Perhaps some cases may become fully chaotic,
with turbulent fow throughout the domain.
So we know that shear-thinning fuids transfer heat
more rapidly but also more unevenly in convection
than plain Newtonian fuids. At this point, to learn
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Page 3 of 4
more of their secrets, we would need to improve the
solvers performance and use upgraded or larger
computers, Barth says. The simulations done for the
dissertation took more than a month of wall-clock
time to compute, Barth notes, which corresponds
to about one CPU-year on the TACC Lonestar and
Longhorn machines, both of which were used for the
calculations.
Barth reported the results at the next meeting of the
Computational Heat Transfer conference, held in
May 2004, and articles are in preparation for journal
publication. He and Carey are hoping that the simu-
lations will stimulate complementary experimental
work. We know that the choice of fuid and appro-
priate experimental apparatus will present difculties
for our laboratory colleagues, Barth says, but they
should not be insuperable, and I think that whether
our own results are verifed or not, such experiments
would be pathbreaking.
As a fnal exploration of the capacities of the MGF
code and its new front end, Barth carried out some
simulations of thermocapillary fows. They were frst
noted by Henri Bnard, a founder of fuid dynam-
ics, at the turn of the 20th century. Bnard observed
a patern of hexagonal cells forming as he heated
Newtonian fuids in shallow containers. Only in the
mid-1950s, however, did other scientists identify the
main force driving the formation of the cells. It was
not buoyancy, but rather the variation in surface ten-
sion across the fuid. Experimenters found they could
control the number and shapes of the cells in circular
and square containers by changing the aspect ratio.
Small numbers of cells with varying shapes (concen-
tric circles, squares, wedges) form at lower aspect
ratios (less than about 15), and as the aspect ratio is
increased, the cells take on the classical hexagonal
shape. Convection ultimately proves to be an intricate
dance of buoyancy, viscosity, thermal difusivity, and
surface tension, and the thermocapillary fows are
those in which surface tension is the driver.
Barth simulated a single case that leads to a four-cell
confguration for Newtonian fuids, again using the
Powell-Eyring and extended Williamson models for
non-Newtonian fuids. He used a 32 x 32 x 6 grid of
uniformly spaced elements. Since the thermocapillary
force acts to draw fuid from hot to cold as buoy-
ancy causes warmer fuid to rise, each spot in the
pictures corresponds to the top of an upwelling of
fuid. In these calculations, the changing viscosity of
the non-Newtonian fuids does not appear to afect
the number or overall geometry of the spots, but the
shear-thinning does appear to increase the heat fux
or transport of warm fuid from the botom, Barth
says.
Conclusion
The studies I did for my dissertation helped to make
MGF into a very general-purpose code, Barth says,
and they pushed not only the limits of our theories
of non-Newtonian fows but also the limits of our
computational power to investigate them. As a sci-
entist at TACC, Barth is continuing his investigations
as a way to benchmark the capacities of massively
parallel cluster computers and to improve fnite-
element solution strategies. It has given me a lot of
experience I can use to collaborate in other projects
in computational fuid dynamics using fnite-element
methods, Barth says. Im already involved in a
number of these, with the Carey group and with oth-
ers. Advancing the computational sciences is TACCs
mission, he says, and Im excited about the oppor-
tunities we are exploring.
Texas Advanced Computing Center | Feature Story
For more info, contact: Faith Singer-Villalobos, Public Relations, faith@tacc.utexas.edu, 512.232.5771
Page 4 of 4