Plastic pollution affects societal health and wellbeing in multiple ways. There are a number of initiatives aimed at changing the way that plastics are designed, produced, used, disposed and reprocessed in the plastics chain. This project is an opportunity to bring together the concepts of plastic flow in solids and turbulence in fluids, that originates at the molecular level, thus showing the universality of the role of coherent structures in all three phases.
Coherent structures can be thought of as the elementary constituent parts of turbulence, much in the same way as elementary particles, are the building blocks of atoms. What is so fascinating, are the strong similarities of turbulent states appearing in hydrodynamical flows and pattern formation in solid plasticity. Surprisingly, these systems are related through strikingly similar mathematics, as indicated by recent developments in gradient theory, which explored and established such a connection between fluid/solid dynamic, that has its roots, we believe, at the molecular level.
We have used this inherent mathematical connection to help solve one of the significant problems in society today, namely the development of numerical codes applied to optimize the recycling process of reprocessed, eventually biodegradable, plastics. We have proposed a high-risk and ambitious pioneering project, to study the universal characteristics of pattern formation in turbulent hydrodynamics and solids in a single mathematically unified manner, that originates at the molecular level. The proposal promises to bridge multiple research areas, to create an interdisciplinary activity, with multiple basic, applied and research benefits.
To date ATM2BT has identified individually unique ways to treat meso-scale fluid dynamics and bulk fluid dynamics, the latter through the deterministic sequence of bifurcations approach and the former through the Landau-Lifshitz Fluctuating Hydrodynamics equations and as the collection of atoms governed by the standard Molecular Dynamics equations. It is the ultimate aim of the consortium to unify the different regimes and tackle the corresponding dynamics in a unique pioneering way. To this end work is continuing beyond the end of the project and will be reported on the associated web site that will continue to exist to report new results and findings in the future. ATM2BT will produce a novel method for simulating large molecular systems: a combined atomistic-continuous representation of the studied system, where multiple time and space scale descriptions are used. We will also use the original approach the consortium has developed for coupling the molecular dynamics and hydrodynamic/particle representations of the same liquid, initiated from previous independent work. Expiation of all figures, provision of data and UMST code are available on request.
To date ATM2BT has not integrated into its UMST the nanoscale configuration. This is ongoing work and it is worth noting at this stage that the integration of the nanoscale has not been infected because of the disruptions during the pandemic and the sequential movement of staff to Institutions outside the consortium. Work is ongoing and the new results will be available on ATM2BT`s web site:
https://eu-atm2bt-project.org(opens in new window). ATM2BT has provided to date an integrated platform for the bulk and mesoscale fluid dynamics and it is expected that it will integrate the nanoscale in the future.
