1/20/2026 Debra Levey Larson
Fabien Evrard received a grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a new computational framework for simulating complex gas-liquid flows.
Written by Debra Levey Larson
Fabien Evrard received a grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a new computational framework for simulating complex gas-liquid flows. The project is a collaborative effort with researchers at Cornell University, combining expertise in multi-scale modeling and computational fluid dynamics.
“This project aims to advance simulations of gas-liquid mixtures, especially when they break apart into small droplets or bubbles and when small droplets or bubbles come together,” Evrard said.
“These fluid behaviors are common in nature, including in the breaking of waves at the ocean surface or the formation of raindrops in clouds. They are also crucial for many engineering applications, such as fuel-injection, crop dusting, and powder manufacturing in food and pharmaceutical industries.”
Evrard said common simulation methods struggle to track small but important details, such as very thin liquid ligaments or tiny droplets.
“We plan to capture fine-scale flow behavior using new interface reconstruction algorithms and physics-informed closure models. The outcome of this work will be a framework capable of accurately predicting break-up and coalescence events as well as droplet size distributions in multi-scale gas-liquid flows. This has so far remained elusive even to the most refined simulation frameworks.”
The resulting framework promises to enable more predictive simulations of multi-scale gas-liquid flows while remaining affordable. The multiphase flow research community will directly benefit from the open-source release of these numerical tools.
As an assistant professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering in The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Evrard expects the new tools to help modernize course content on multiphase flows, benefiting both undergraduate and graduate engineering students.
The National Science Foundation Division of Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental and Transport Systems invests in fundamental research and education that involve the transformation and transport of matter and energy by chemical, thermal or mechanical means.
The title of Evrard’s project is, “Collaborative Research: Multi-scale modeling of surface tension-driven dynamics with physics-informed sub-grid closures.”