Malcom J. Andrews
National Security Fellow
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Thursday March 31, 2016
2:00pm
800 22nd Street NW, SEH B1220
Washington, DC 20052
Hosted by: Dr.Michael Plesniak ([email protected])
Abstract
The Rayleigh-Taylor instability has been the subject of detailed research for over 60 years, but what have we learned, and why has progress been slow? The answer lies in a combination of limited recognized applications, difficulties with performing experiments, and, perhaps the lack of walls! I plan to review progress over the last 60 years, and demonstrate how our understanding has been built, with asides that cover misconceptions, and the unique experiments that have been explored. Present day RT research will be discussed, modern applications (the continuing search for the presence of RT), and difficulties with experiments/simulation/theory. Remarkable progress with RT research, and application, has been made over the past 25 years, but there are still significant opportunities for RT research that will be discussed.
Biography:
Dr. Malcolm Andrews is an expert on Rayleigh-Taylor mixing and unstable or turbulent fluid flow processes that are critical to the predictive quality of the nation’s stockpile stewardship. Presently he was formerly group lead for XCP-4 (Methods and Algorithms), ASC project lead for Mix and Burn, and National Security Fellow as Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). Presently he is an Executive Advisor to the NNSA in Washington DC. Andrews received an E.O. Lawrence Award in 2007 “For pioneering contributions in the area of fluids instabilities and turbulent mixing with expertise spanning the realms of theory, numerical simulation, and experiment.”
Andrews was born in 1958 in Coventry, England. He received his B.A. and M.A. degrees in Mathematics from Oxford University in 1980, and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Imperial College, London, in 1986. Andrews was a lecturer at Princeton University from 1986 to 1991, and a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University for 15 years. Having served as a consultant to T-Division for 18 years Andrews joined LANL in 2005, and resided in CCS-2 as a Scientist 5, leading and performing various projects related to mixing until 2010 when he joined XCP. He has published more than 200 peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and conference papers, and holds four patents. He is Technical Editor of the American Society of Mechanical Engineer’s (ASME) Journal of Fluids Engineering, a Fellow of the ASME, and an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Over the past four decades Andrews has made a broad and penetrating set of contributions in buoyancy driven mixing by Rayleigh-Taylor in ICF capsules, oil-trapping salt domes, turbine blade cooling, Bridgeman crystal growth, fuel spray disintegration, and micro-encapsulation of active agents. From this research he has spun many insights that have lead to other significant contributions across several allied fields, including heat transfer (heat exchangers, radiators), and multiphase flows (insights and algorithms for multiphase flow, sprays, deposition).