Shane
Connelly

The focus of my research is on the fundamental understanding and modeling of transport processes with industrial and environmental interest. Novel computational methods are developed and applied to explore turbulent transport of mass and heat, flow and mass transfer in bioreactors, heat transfer in micro- and nano-fluidics, and flow and transport through porous media.

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Numerical experiments are conducted in a virtual laboratory. Our methods provide excellent measurements for turbulent channel and plane Couette flow, we can measure heat and mass transfer in these channels and we can monitor the trajectories of hundreds of thousands of particles. Our Lagrangian scalar tracking (LST) methodology is used to investigate flow effects on the progress of chemical reactions, to study the transport of nutrients in porous scaffolds used for bone tissue growth, and to explore the thermal properties of carbon nanotube composite materials. We are also employing multiscale methods for transport through porous materials. We use Dissipative Particle Dynamics to investigate nanofluids and their rheological behavior and surface-nanoparticle interactions. In each case, the flow is simulated using appropriate methods for each important physical scale. High End Computers are utilized to conduct the numerical experiments and to interpret the data. Parallel to the development of prototype software, off-the-shelf software is used to predict flows that can improve industrially important process, such as melt-blowing, or can predict hemodynamics, such as blood flow in the human vascular system and hemolysis.