MechE Seminar Series: Emilie Dressaire

Speaker: Emilie Dressaire

Title: Flowing through tight spaces: from confined porous media to hydro-fractures

Abstract: A wealth of biological and engineered systems rely on porous media to filter suspended particles, generate drag, and displace a second fluid. Controlling the flow through the void space is therefore essential. The complex dependence of the permeability on the porosity or void fraction can be leveraged to achieve such control. In this talk, I will discuss two studies involving low permeability environments: confined porous media and soft substrates that can fracture to accommodate the flow. Hair-covered appendages serve a variety of purposes in Nature. Confining structures, such as larger hairs, have been hypothesized to focus the flow on the hair-covered region. We studied the influence of confinement on the flow through and around an array of cylinders, using a combination of experiments and numerical simulations. We demonstrate that confinement and porosity control the amount of fluid flowing through the pores. The injection of fluid in low permeability soft materials drives the formation of fluid-driven fractures, for example in rocks. We experimentally investigated the propagation of fluid-driven fractures through multilayered materials. In heterogeneous materials, the propagation of the fracture and the fluid flow depend on both the local properties of the material and the fracture history.

About the Speaker: Emilie Dressaire received a B.S. in Engineering from ESPCI, France, in 2005, and a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Harvard University in 2009. She joined the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at NYU Tandon School of Engineering and is now a faculty member in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UCSB. She served on the Executive Committee of APS DFD and is looking forward to hosting the APS-DFD in Long Beach in 2029. Her research interests are centered around small scale fluid mechanics and soft matter physics.