Phase-change processes are present in everyday life, nature, technology and in scientific applications. In particular, the melting of ice into salty water is directly linked to the melting of icebergs and glaciers into the ocean. Accurately predicting their melting rate is vital for understanding climate change, and for developing strategies to mitigate it.
However, there is a huge gap between predictions given by current models of melting, compared with field and experimental measurements, as a result of the high complexity and multi-scale nature of the process, involving heat transfer, mass transfer and flow dynamics, which in many cases is turbulent.
The presence of subsurface currents and salt in the water also have a non-trivial effect on the melting dynamics. Furthermore, patterns and roughness on the ice-liquid interface can modify the surrounding flow properties, giving rise to intricate coupled behaviours and feedback mechanisms, which are not entirely well understood.
In this project, the team will use newly developed, highly scalable computational methods to investigate and disentangle the fundamental physics underlying these problems through carefully controlled idealised simulations, with the goal of identifying how the different mechanisms are coupled with each other, and how they affect the melting process.
University of Rome, Tor Vergata, Italy.
University of Twente, Netherlands.