MMAE Seminar - Dr. Michael W. Plesniak - Pulsatile Fluid Mechanics with Biomedical Applications
Armour College of Engineering's Mechanical, Materials & Aerospace Engineering Department will welcome Dr. Michael W. Plesniak, Chair of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the George Washington University, on Wednesday, October 25th, to present his lecture, Pulsatile Fluid Mechanics with Biomedical Applications.
Abstract
Pulsatile flows, unsteady phenomena, coherent vortical structures, and transitional or turbulent flows at low Reynolds numbers occur in the human body. Examples of pathological blood flow in which unsteadiness, separation and turbulence are important include regurgitant heart valves, stenoses or blockages, stents, and arterial branches and bifurcations. Speech production involves unsteady pulsatile flow and turbulent structures that affect the aeroacoustics and fluid-tissue interaction. Our overarching motivation for studying flows relevant to biomedical applications is to facilitate evaluation and design of treatment interventions and for surgical planning, i.e. to enable physicians to assess the outcomes of surgical procedures by using faithful computer simulations. The overall goal of our cardiovascular-inspired research program is to understand secondary flow structures in arteries and to assess their potential impact on vascular health and disease progression. The richness of morphologies and physics of secondary flow vortical structures and their formation and subsequent loss of coherence during deceleration phases suggests implications related to the blood flow in diseased, stented and stent-fractured conditions. The goal of our human phonation research program is to investigate the dynamics of flow past the vocal folds (VF) and the aerodynamic interaction with the VF. Studies are performed under both normal and pathological conditions of speech. This has led to very fundamental studies of 3D flow separation in pulsatile flows.
Biography
Dr. Michael W. Plesniak is Professor and Chair of the Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering at the George Washington University, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. Dr. Plesniak is the Director of GW's Center for Biomimetics and Bioinspired Engineering. He was formerly Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University and Eugene Kleiner Professor for Innovation in Mechanical Engineering at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, NY. He served as the Director of the Fluid Dynamics & Hydraulics program at the National Science Foundation from 2002-2006. Prof. Plesniak earned his Ph.D. degree from Stanford University, and his M.S. and B.S degrees from the Illinois Institute of Technology; all in Mechanical Engineering. Dr. Plesniak is a Fellow of AIAA, ASME, the American Physical Society (APS), the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) and the Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He has authored over two hundred fifty refereed archival publications, conference papers and presentations. Prof. Plesniak received the 2017 ASME Fluids Engineering Award, and was named the AIAA, National Capital Section Engineer of the Year 2010-2011.