MCEC Members: Sander Huisman (UT)



In the second phase of MCEC, we have welcomed many new members. In this rubric we will introduce them to you. 

Sander Huisman (UT)

… is an assistant professor in the Physics of Fluids group at the University of Twente.

What do you do?
I’m the experimental lead in many turbulent (multiphase) flows, in a variety of geometries such as: water channels, Taylor-Couette (flow between concentric rotating cylinders), and ‘French’ washing machine.

I’ve looked at a variety of topics including emulsions, roughness, membranes, obstructed heat convection, evaporation dynamics, boiling, drag reduction, algorithmic design, oscillatory flow, and flows with (chiral) particles, and heat transport in bubbly flows.

Effect of bubbles on heat and mass transfer in turbulent flows
Within MCEC, I work on finding the effect of bubbles on heat and mass transfer in turbulent flows. To this end we have constructed a new setup called the Twente Heat and Mass transfer tunnel: https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5092967 .

Which is a vertical water channel that can locally heat the flow, inject bubbles, and it has an active grid to stir the turbulence:

 

Multiphase turbulent flow
I have two PhD students, Peter Dung and Pim Waasdorp, working on this flow and look into the various aspects of multiphase turbulent flow.

Apart from this setup I also do a variety of topics in the Taylor–Couette geometry, with my students I’m looking at possibilities of drag reduction in such a geometry which are then being used for maritime applications.

We also have looked at water-oil emulsions in this geometry with some surprising results that can be used in e.g. the food industry and petrochemical processing.

What does the near future look like?
I will continue to look at these types of flows, but I’m also working on the evaporation dynamics of aerosols in homogeneous isotropic turbulence. This line of research was of course initiated because of the corona crisis.

The role of the aerosols is not well understood, and the dynamics of such aerosols (their evaporation rate for example) are not well known when they are clustered in groups inside a turbulent flow with a certain (background) temperature and humidity. We want to explore this experimentally in our new experimental facility.