Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

In asymptotic analysis and numerical approximation of highly-oscillatory evolution problems, it is commonly supposed that the oscillation frequency is either constant or, at least, bounded from below by a strictly positive constant uniformly in time. Allowing for the possibility that the frequency actually depends on time and vanishes at some instants introduces additional difficulties from both the asymptotic analysis and numerical simulation points of view. I will present a first step towards the resolution of these difficulties. In particular, we show that it is still possible in this situation to infer the asymptotic behavior of the solution at the price of more intricate computations and we derive a second order uniformly accurate numerical method.

Prym varieties are a class of abelian varieties that arise from double covers of tropical or algebraic curves. The talk will revolve around the Prym--Brill--Noether locus, a subvariety determined by divisors of a given rank. Using a connection to Young tableaux, we determine the dimensions of these loci for certain tropical curves, with applications to algebraic geometry. Furthermore, these loci are always pure dimensional and path connected. Finally, we compute the first homologies of the Prym--Brill--Noether loci under certain conditions.

Soot particles are major pollutants emitted from propulsion and power generation systems. In turbulent combustion, soot evolution is heavily influenced by soot-turbulence-chemistry interaction. Specifically, soot is formed during combustion of fuel-rich mixtures and is rapidly oxidized before being transported by turbulence into fuel-lean mixtures. Furthermore, different soot evolution mechanisms are dominant over distinct regions of mixture fraction. For these reasons, a new subfilter Probability Density Function (PDF) model is proposed to account for this distribution of soot in mixture fraction space. At the same time, Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) studies of turbulent nonpremixed jet flames have revealed that Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAH), the gas-phase soot precursors, are confined to spatially intermittent regions of low scalar dissipation rates due to their slow formation chemistry. The length scales of these regions are on the order of the Kolmogorov scale (i.e., the smallest turbulence scale) or smaller, where molecular diffusion dominates over turbulent mixing irrespective of the large-scale turbulent Reynolds number. A strain-sensitivity parameter is developed to identify such species. A Strain-Sensitive Transport Approach (SSTA) is then developed to model the differential molecular transport in the nonpremixed “flamelet” equations. These two models are first validated a priori against a DNS database, and then implemented within a Large Eddy Simulation (LES) framework, applied to a series of turbulent nonpremixed sooting jet flames, and validated via comparisons with experimental measurements of soot volume fraction.

The field of complex dynamics melds a number of disciplines, including complex analysis, geometry and topology. I will focus on the influences from the latter, introducing some important concepts and questions in complex dynamics, with an emphasis on how the concepts tie into and can be enhanced by a topological viewpoint.