NSF INVESTS $265,000 IN MICROFLOW AND NANOFLOW RESEARCH OF ODU'S BESKOK, LUO

When a gas flows through a gap that is significantly narrower than a human hair, strange things can happen and it has been difficult for scientists and engineers to quantify the phenomena that take over on such a small scale. But for two Old Dominion University researchers, mathematician Li-Shi Luo and engineer Ali Beskok, this is a problem that has become an opportunity.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has invested $265,000 in their proposal to devise what might be called a composite computational model of microflows and nanoflows. Their research scheme will draw from both men's expertise and could produce results that promote further miniaturization of electronic devices and components, including disk drives and the micro-arrays of mirrors used in video projection. Fundamental research along these lines also could be applied to microsensors used in medicine or to test the air for pollution or toxins.

Beskok, who came to ODU in 2007 as the Batten Endowed Professor of Computational Engineering, is only 11 years removed from his Ph.D. studies at Princeton University in mechanical and aerospace engineering. But already he has established himself as a distinguished researcher in the rapidly expanding field of microflows and nanoflows. He is an author together with his doctoral adviser, G.E. Karniadakis.

Beskok's early work helped to create a unified model to predict the characteristics of rarefied gas flows in pipes and ducts. The model has proven to be valid for various "regimes" starting with the mush of the continuum and tightening down to a slip regime, a transition regime and a free molecular regime. The latter, which involves flows at the nanoscale (a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter), falls into the area of molecular dynamics. "My work makes his algorithms richer through all of the flow regimes," Beskok says of his collaboration with Luo.