Professor Prashant Valluri

Personal Chair in Fluid Dynamics and Director of Discipline

Email: 

Prashant.Valluri@ed.ac.uk

Telephone: 

+44(0)131 6505691

Location: 

2.2414 James Clerk Maxwell Building, 2.2010 James Clerk Maxwell Building

Engineering Discipline: 

  • Chemical Engineering

Research Institute: 

  • Multiscale Thermofluids

Research Theme: 

  • Multiphase flows, interfaces and phase change from nano- to macro-scales

Research Publications

Professor Prashant Valluri
Professor Prashant Valluri

Biography: 

My work centres around the development of understanding and mathematical models for complex multiphase flow patterns to tackle various industrial problems like cleaning, oil-gas transport, slurry transport, distillation, absorption, thermal management of microdevices and biological problems such as cerebral temperature regulation and lung function.

Academic Qualifications: 

PhD, Department of Chemical Engineering, Imperial College London, 2004

  • Thesis Title: Multiphase Fluid Dynamics in Structured Packing

 

Professional Qualifications and Memberships: 

Teaching: 

  • Fluid Mechanics 4 (Chemical) CHEE10004
  • Chemical Engineering Industrial Project 5 CHEE11014
  • Chemical Engineering Research Project 5 CHEE11017
  • Chemical Engineering Study Project 4 CHEE10009
  • Chemical Engineering Design Projects 4 CHEE10002
  • Chemical Engineering 1 Laboratory CHEE08001
  • Chemical Engineering in Practise 3 CHEE09006

Research Interests: 

Multiphase (and single-phase) fluid dynamics and transport phenomena

Hydrodynamic stability

Instabilities are at the heart of all multiphase flows - they are responsible for regime transitions and all other extraordinarily complex and seemingly chaotic flow patterns that multiphase flows demonstrate. In particular, instabilities observed on fluid-fluid interfaces (liquid-vapour) when coupled to complexities such as phase-change (evaporation/ condensation/ boiling), reactions etc.  

Development of Ultra-High Resolution Multiphase Flow Solvers

My group also develops bespoke multiphase 3D flow solvers - based on the target application. For example:

  1. TPLS Flow Solver (V2 Opensourced in May 2015) - For two layer (fluid/fluid) flows - for oil/gas or oil/water flows, gas/liquid flows in absorption or distillation units, or for phase change flows for thermal management of microdevices.
  2. GISS Flow Solver (soon to be opensourced) - DNS solver for immersed solids in flows - for slurry flows such as hydrate agglomerates or large complex-shaped solids immersed in flowing fluids.

These solvers are optimised for supercomputing clusters such as ARCHER.

Videos

You can get a good idea about my research work by watching my videos.

My Inaugural Lecture (from 2021 but long)

You can watch this video on Media Hopper or on YouTube.

My Research in a Nutshell video (from 2011 but short and quick) :

You can watch this video on Media Hopper or on YouTube.

Research Output

Specialities: 

  • Transport phenomena (e.g. phase change, reaction-diffusion transport)
  • Multiphase (& single phase) fluid dynamics: Development of numerical (CFD/DNS) and analytical (stability theory) tools (e.g. oil-gas-solid pipeline flows, industrial cleaning and fouling)
  • Biological fluid dynamics (e.g. brain temperature mapping, arterial flows, enzymatic kinetics)

Further Information: 

  • Head of Graduate School (2018 - present)
  • Deputy Head of Graduate School (2016 - present)
  • Acting Deputy Head of Graduate School (2015 - 2016)