Professor M. Bussmann

PhD (Toronto)

Research Interests

Free surface flows are ubiquitous in nature and industry.  Nature provides us with many examples, including rainfall, river and ocean flows.  Industrial examples are numerous.  Spray-based processes include spray combustion, thermal spraying, spray forming, spray painting, powder production, spray drying, spray cooling, and agricultural spraying.  Liquid atomization has many applications, including ink jet printing.  And most applications involving the solidification of liquid metals (e.g. casting) include free surface flows.

While experiment may be the most direct avenue to studying such flows and developing such processes, it is expensive and time-consuming.  As a result, the use of numerical modelling has become commonplace and will only continue to grow.  The presence of one or more free surfaces, and the surface tension associated with these, complicates the analysis of such flows.  Yet there are now a variety of algorithms available to model them, and algorithm development will continue.

My research interests include the following:


• Numerical simulation of free surface and capillary flows.
• Simulation of materials processing techniques.
• Free surface modelling algorithms.
• Droplet and spray phenomena.
• Particle deposition and coating processes.