Research: Simulations of Washing Machine Processes

Sponsor: Whirlpool Corporation
Collaborator: Prof. Schultz
The essential element of clothes washing is the interaction of cloth and water when driven by the action of a washing machine's agitator or impeller. Such simulations are challenging because they must account for the nonlinear mechanics of both water and cloth. The goal of these simulations was to predict cloth motion in a deep-water wash cycle by coupling Lagrangian simulations of flexible plates (i.e. the cloth) with computations of viscous fluid dynamics on an Eulerian grid using the immersed boundary method. Unfortunately, these two-phase (cloth and water) simulations were superseded by new commercial technologies that involve three-phase (cloth, water, and air) flow.

References:
Akcabay, Dowling & Schultz, Computers & Fluids 100, 79-94 [2014].

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Current Research Projects
1. Predictions of Acoustic Uncertainty
2. Blind Deconvolution in Reverberant Environments
3. Nonlinear Techniques for Remote Sensing
4. Acoustic Diagnostics for Reverberant Environments

Recent Research Projects
5. Acoustic Coherent Backscatter Enhancement
6. Simulations of Washing Machine Processes
7. Turbulent Boundary Layers At High Reynolds Number
8. Multi-dimensional Measurements of Velocity during Thermoplastic Injection Molding
9. Beyond Line-of-sight Acoustic Sensing
10. Measurements of Oil-film Thickness