Professor Matthias Heil, Department of Mathematics, University of Manchester, presents this lecture on; “How Oscillating Collapsible Tubes Extract Energy from a Viscous Flow.”
Abstract: Many physiological flows (e.g. blood flow in the veins and art eries or the flow of air in the pulmonary airways) are strongly affected by the interaction between th e fluid flow and the vessel wall elas ticity. Experimentally, the problem is typically studied with a `Starling resistor’, a device in which fluid is driven through a finite-length, thin-walled, elastic tube which is mounted on two rigid tubes and enclosed in a pressure chamber. One of the most striking features of this system is its propensity to develop large-amplitude self-excited oscillations. Our understanding of the mechanism(s) that initiate and maintain these oscillations is still limited.
In this talk I will present recent theoretical and computational studies of this problem. In particular, I will present results of joint work with Sarah Waters (Nottingham, soon Oxford) in which we identified a mechanism by which an oscillating collapsible tube is able to extract energy from a viscous flow
Biography: Following the award of a PhD in Applied Mathematics at the University of Leeds, in 1995, I spent a year as a postdoc at MIT, followed by another two year postdoc at the University of Cambridge. In 1998 I was appointed to a lectureship at the University of Manchester where I was promoted to Reader (in 2002) and then to a personal Chair in 2007. From 2001-2005 I held a prestigious Advanced Research Fellowship from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).