Tobias Bauer
Swiss Federal Technical Institute
Supervisor: Prof. Outi Supponen
Brief Bio
Tobias is a Ph.D. candidate and doctoral researcher at ETH Zürich, where he is working on cavitation inception and dynamics in the presence of suspended particles or drops. He earned both his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Mechanical Engineering from TU Chemnitz, followed by a second Master's in Fluid Mechanics at Sorbonne Université, graduating with first-class honours. His Master's thesis on droplet impacts in the course of foliar disease transmission at the Microfluidics Lab of the University of Liège resulted in a publication in Physical Review Fluids. Tobias has gained diverse industry experience through internships at Fraunhofer IWU, Porsche Leipzig, and the D'Alembert Institute in Paris. In his free time, he enjoys participating in triathlons, as well as climbing and hiking.
Project Description
The close vicinity of rigid or mobile surfaces leads to asymmetric cavity collapse with intense shear and pressure hammer, which can be harnessed for achieving desired particle or droplet breakage. However, that requires thorough and quantitative understanding of inception and dynamics of collapsing cavities in presence of suspended particles or drops. This open challenge will be addressed by understanding the physical mechanisms behind cavitation in particle-laden fluids. The PhD project will reveal their effects on cavitation inception and dynamics through idealised experiments and computational models. The key objectives are: 1) Design experiments for 10m fps visualisation and acoustic analysis of cavitation inception and dynamics; 2) Synthesise and test particles to assess their effect on cavitation nucleation (single particle vs. clusters; 3) Develop an empirically-based predictive tool for nucleation onset in particle-laden fluids; 4) Perform systematic experiments on cavity-particle interactions at cavity cloud level. The key expected results are: 1) Experimental technique and new data to characterise cavitation nucleation; 2) Physical model which couples single-particle nucleation to a particle-laden fluid cavitation; 3) Characterisation of cavitation inception for different types of particles.
