Research interests
Cellular automata for hydrodynamics
  • Cellular automata have been used for various applications in the past decades. I have already mentionned the (TA)SEP, which taught us a lot about out-of-equilibrium systems. During my PHd (supervisor S. Zaleski), I was also interested in cellular automata devoted to hydrodynamics simulations. We had added an attractive interaction in order to create a liquid-gas phase transition. This is important both for applications, but also on a more fundamental level, to understand the specificities of dynamical phase transition. Note that now this expression is used with a different meaning as in the context of out-of-equilibrium systems. We mean here that phase transitions result from the dynamical rules of the model, while no energy conservation law exists. In particular, forces are defined purely dynamically, and do not derive from a potential.
  • As cellular automata are by nature limited in the range of parameters that they can reach, these liquid-gas models have been generalized to Boltzmann lattice models.
  • For the Boltzmann model for immiscible fluids that was introduced by Rothman et al, we studied the dynamics of phase separation.