Chen Xiaoming
Research
Fiber distribution in a polished section of a carbon-epoxy pultruded PMC rod. Photograph was taken with the Olympus BX50, using an air objective, 50x magnification.
Speed contour of transverse flow through aligned random fiber array (work done in Loslobos)
Contour of first principal stress (S1/s0) in a random fiber array subjected to a tensile stress s0 in the horizontal direction
!Current research
My current research focuses on the characterization and modeling of fiber-reinforced polymer matrix composites (PMC), which are truly heterogeneous systems. The objective is to provide a sound theoretical linkage between the microstructure and the material properties.
The characterization of PMCs in our group is done via the optical reflection microscopy. Our group has an integrated system for automated image processing, which is comprised of an Olympus BX50 Transmitted and Reflected Light Microscope, a CCD digital camera, a Prior motorized stage and a Dell dual-CPU workstation. Fiber images and geometrical metrics such as center coordinates, size, diameter, and ellipticities can be obtained via an imaging software SimplePCI, then be analyzed with spatial statistical methods. I am responsible for developing both sequential and parallel codes for the part of spatial analysis.
Our group also carry out 2D and 3D simulations for elastic deformation of PMCs and flow through aligned fiber preforms, using in-house-developed codes as well as commercial CFD software. I am responsible for writing a multi-boundary Boundary Element code for flow through fibrous media and a multi-region Boundary Element code for elastic deformation of PMCs. The codes have been parallelized using the Message Passing Interface (MPI) for distributed-memory parallel computers. Our group has a 8-node Alpha-Linux cluster for the parallel code development. We are running large-scale simulations on a IBM supercomputer (Loslobos) located at the high performance computing center of University of New Mexico.
!Previous project ¾ Simulation of curtain coating flow
One of my previous projects is the simulation of curtain coating flow using FIDAP, a commercial software of Fluent Inc. It was a short-term project for the Fujifilm company at Greenwood, South Carolina. The project aimed to predict stable flows in the curtain coating operations and analyze factors that affect the coating operability. I liked this project because it is a challenging problem which involves inertia, viscosity, gravity, capillarity and multiple evolving free boundaries (unfortunately it did not continue). Here I would like to include some results for my memory.