This is a no-nonsense treatise on scientific aspects of rock climbing, as well as technical discussion on some advanced climbing techniques. The mathematical and physical principles discussed herein aim to provide a self-consistent body of information from which practical advice on climbing techniques, use of equipment and safety, can be deduced by an astute reader.…
I extended the in-house code for a 1D fluid model of a silent discharge in a parallel-plate geometry and subsequently developed and coded an extensive 2D fluid model. The code supports simulations of various cold plasmaconfigurations, from dielectric barrier discharges to extreme-field nanosecond streamers. The fluid model is solved with finite-difference and finite-volume methods on…
We develop a finite volume method based on unstructured triangular and/or quadrangular meshes for the numerical modeling of gas discharges at atmospheric pressure. The discretization of the computational domain is performed with median-dual control-volumes. Gradient calculations at the faces of the control-volumes are based on finite-element interpolation using shape functions. An FCT method was chosen…
The goal was to increase spatial uniformity of gas flow field injected onto a substrate in a AP-PECVD process. I proposed a novel type of tubular injector with an auxiliary inner showerhead and performed a CFD analysis to demonstrate the effects of various design parameters and operating conditions in terms of vorticity and local Reynolds…
I optimized a dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) reactor in terms of selectivity, deposition rate and product yield. I designed a hybrid model coupling a 2D stationary model of the deposition reactor to the 1D time-dependent plasma equations. The optimization results, presented in the form of ternary plots, offer industrial applicability and ease of interpretation.
To complement the research into phase-space kinetic theory of polymer solutions I turned again to computer simulations, specifically to Brownian dynamics of DNA electrophoresis under pressure-driven flow in micro-channels. In contrast to the majority of similar studies reported in the literature, I included electrically-induced hydrodynamic interactions, yielding uniformly valid solutions for small Debye lengths.I classified…
I extended the kinetic theory of dilute polymer solutions under external fields to include finite-chain extensibility, and to properly account for wall-inducedhydrodynamic interactions. I developed formulas for the scaling of the depletion layer with the Peclet number and for the variation of molecular stretch and normal stresses; I also derived migration tensors for the Green’s…
During my early PhD studies I focused on molecular dynamics simulations of DNA in Gromacs and an efficient implementation of multigrid methods. Later, I started developing a C++/Fortran code to model the transport of biomolecules in micro-devices under elektrokinetic flows. I developed anovel hybrid method that combines Langevin dynamics for a bead-spring DNA model, and…
This work focused on the theoretical analysis of a prototype device for dielectrophoretic particle separation reported in the literature. Motivated by the effort to minimize the number of adjustable parameters used by the original authors, I quantified the electrophoretic, dielectrophoretic and electroosmotic effects more precisely using a multipole expansion. For details, see the appendix of…
