Multiscale free-boundary problems in reactive decontamination and filtration

Many continuum mechanics problems of practical interest are difficult to model or simulate accurately due to the multiple spatial scales involved. Additional complexities arise when there are also free or moving boundaries. I will discuss two industrial examples of this: the chemical decontamination of a porous building material (for instance, following a chemical weapons attack) and the motion of an evaporation front through a drying filter membrane. In each case, fluids and chemical species are transported through a complicated porespace domain, undergoing chemical reactions or phase change at free boundaries within this microscale domain. I will explain how asymptotic analysis (combining homogenisation and boundary layer analyses) may be used to derive much simpler, computationally tractable models for these processes on the macroscale, and explore how we can use these homogenised models to learn about the industrial problems of interest.

Ellen Luckins is a Zeeman Lecturer in the Warwick Mathematics Institute, with research interests in continuum mechanics, industrial maths, and asymptotic analysis. Previously, she was a postdoc at the University of Oxford, where she also completed her doctorate.