Fluid Dynamics · Cross-listed from physics.comp-ph
On the Assessment of Domain Decomposition Approaches in Extended Physics-Informed Neural Networks for the Shock-Dominated Burgers Equation
Andrés F. Bolaños-Acosta and Julián C. Restrepo
Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) provide a mesh-free framework for solving partial differential equations but often struggle with sharp gradients and shock-dominated solutions. Extended Physics-Informed Neural Networks (XPINNs) address this challenge through domain decomposition; however, the effects of decomposition design, overlap, and local network capacity on solution accuracy remain insufficiently characterized. This work presents a systematic assessment of domain decomposition configurations for XPINNs applied to the one-dimensional viscous Burgers equation ($\nu=0.01/\pi$). We compare a standard PINN, a conventional XPINN, a shock-focused XPINN with increased network capacity in the shock-containing subdomain, and overlapping XPINNs with different overlap widths. All configurations are trained using a common protocol based on Adam, L-BFGS refinement, and ten Residual-based Adaptive Refinement (RAR) cycles. Performance is evaluated against a reference solution using global and shock-region relative $L_2$ and $L_\infty$ errors, maximum PDE residuals, and interface continuity errors. The results show that decomposition design strongly affects XPINN accuracy and shock resolution. Among the overlapping configurations, the smallest overlap provides the best accuracy, while larger overlaps degrade performance. The shock-focused XPINN achieves the lowest overall solution errors, indicating that increased local network capacity can provide greater benefit than increasing overlap alone. RAR produces the largest improvements during early refinement stages, followed by increasingly non-monotonic changes in accuracy. These findings highlight the importance of jointly considering decomposition, interface coupling, network capacity, and adaptive refinement for shock-dominated problems.
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Fluid Dynamics · Cross-listed from cs.LG
A Data-Free Physics-Informed Neural Operator for Level-Set Interface Advection
Muhammad Akbar Khan
Operators for interfacial problems are trained on reference solutions produced by the solver they are intended to replace. This work develops a data-free physics-informed neural operator for level-set interface advection, in which the interface is the equation's unknown and the operator maps an initial interface to the full spatiotemporal trajectory under a prescribed flow. Training uses only the transport residual and a
geometric constraint; no reference solution enters the objective at any point. A spacetime
Fourier backbone emits the entire trajectory in one pass, and the initial condition is imposed by construction rather than by penalty, which removes the competition between the anchoring term and the residual that otherwise arises when no solution data are available. Supervised and hybrid operators are trained under an identical architecture, family, budget and test set, and are reported throughout as baselines that quantify what refusing labels costs. On a reversed single
vortex the data-free operator reaches 1.614 +/- 0.067% relative L2 error on 100 held-out initial interfaces against 0.369 +/- 0.035% for the supervised baseline, a factor of 4.4; on solid-body rotation the corresponding figures are 3.804 +/- 1.075% and 2.576 +/- 0.159%, a factor of 1.5. The two
benchmarks rank the arms differently, and the difference is attributable to the eikonal constraint: the exact solution violates |grad phi| = 1 over 0.3% of the domain under rotation and 86.9% under the
vortex. Where the constraint is valid the physics-trained operator conserves enclosed area 2.7 times better than the supervised baseline despite a larger field error, and a hybrid arm using eight reference solutions outperforms a supervised arm using sixteen.
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Fluid Dynamics · Cross-listed from physics.plasm-ph
Reactive Trace Species Modeling with the Simulation Tool PICLas
Simone Lauterbach, Kim-Sophie Ellenberger, Stefanos Fasoulas et al. (+1 more)
A species-specific weighting scheme for the Natural-Sample-Size collision model within the Direct Simulation Monte Carlo method is developed and implemented in the open-source gas and
plasma solver PICLas. The implemented weighting scheme places particular emphasis on chemical reactions and ionization processes of trace species in order to guarantee physically accurate and low-noise simulations of atmospheric entry processes. The successful implementation and the conservation of momentum and energy during relaxation processes and chemical reactions are verified through a reservoir simulation of a reacting air mixture. As a more sophisticated validation case, atmospheric entry simulations of a cylinder at an altitude of 108 km are investigated. In a final step, the developed weighting scheme is employed to investigate ionization processes in the shock layer surrounding the RAM-C II reentry probe during atmospheric entry. The simulations showed very good agreement with experimental flight data and reduced noise in the rarefied regions for the charged species.
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All authors Simone Lauterbach, Kim-Sophie Ellenberger, Stefanos Fasoulas, Marcel Pfeiffer
Fluid Dynamics
Modelling friction and heat transfer in turbulent forced convection over porous lattices
Aneek Chakraborty, Stefan Hickel and Davide Modesti
We perform direct numerical simulations (DNS) to investigate how cubic-
lattice porous substrates influence momentum and heat transfer in turbulent channel flows. The simulations span friction Reynolds numbers from 260 to 1500, Prandtl numbers of 0.5, 1, and 2, and substrate porosities of 50%, 71%, and 87%. We show that theories developed for rough- wall
turbulence can be extended to porous surfaces by replacing the roughness height with the inverse of the streamwise Forchheimer coefficient. The shifts in the mean velocity and temperature profiles follow existing fully rough momentum and thermal theories, enabling their prediction with rough-wall models. Combining these models with synthetic temperature and velocity profiles, we derive analytical formulas for the friction coefficient and Stanton number that agree with our DNS data to within 5%. The performance enhancement factor, which measures heat-transfer augmentation relative to the pressure-drop penalty at constant pumping power, is comparable to that obtained for rough surfaces. This suggests that porous substrates provide an alternative method for enhancing heat transfer in turbulent flows.
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Fluid Dynamics
Applications of a moving surface drag model: From Stokes waves to offshore wind farms
Manuel Ayala, Zein Sadek, Raul. B Cal et al. (+2 more)
Offshore wind farms operate within the marine atmospheric boundary layer, where ocean waves can modify air-sea momentum transfer, turbine inflow, and wake recovery. Wave-resolved simulations can capture phase-dependent wind–wave interactions, but their computational cost and implementation complexity limit their use in large atmospheric and wind-farm domains. This study describes applications and tests of the recently proposed moving surface drag (MOSD) model, a flat-bottom wall-stress formulation for horizontally resolved moving waves, to a sequence of increasingly complex wind–wave and offshore wind-energy applications. The model is first evaluated for turbulent flow over Stokes-like waves using laboratory measurements, where it reproduces mean velocity profiles and captures the qualitative structure of wave-induced motions, although their amplitude is underpredicted. MOSD is then applied to broadband wave spectra fields and offshore wind-farm boundary layers, showing good agreement with mean velocity profiles from wave-resolved simulations across different wave ages, grid resolutions, and turbine spacings. Finally, exploratory offshore wind-farm simulations using MOSD under conventionally neutral conditions demonstrate its application at wind-farm scale. Large-scale waves leave detectable signatures in near-surface velocity spectra, but these signatures decay with height and do not produce clear peaks in temporal spectra of aggregate turbine power. Overall, the results demonstrate that the MOSD model provides a tractable framework for incorporating resolved wave effects in wind-wave and offshore wind-farm simulations.
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All authors Manuel Ayala, Zein Sadek, Raul. B Cal, Dennice. F Gayme, Charles Meneveau
Fluid Dynamics
An experimental and numerical study of the circular hydraulic jump
Arnab Kumar Mallik, Hrvoje Jasak, D. Ian Wilson et al. (+2 more)
This paper describes experiments and numerical simulations on the normal impact of a round
liquid jet onto a horizontal surface, such as when water from a tap hits the bottom of a kitchen sink. In this case the
liquid impacting on the surface spreads as a fast-flowing thin film and, at some distance from the point of impact, the thickness of the flow abruptly increases and the speed of the flow is reduced. In the experiments studied here the flow is axisymmetric about the axis of the jet, and the abrupt change in depth occurs at a given radius and is known as a circular hydraulic jump (CHJ). We present new experiments in which we measure the thickness of the
liquid film inside and beyond the jump and use these measurements to estimate the governing parameters, the Weber, Froude and Reynolds numbers that determine the influence of surface tension,
gravity and viscosity, respectively. We also carry out numerical simulations of the flow that show excellent agreement with the experiments and provide independent estimates of these dimensionless parameters. We find that, on the scale of a kitchen sink, and for water at high Reynolds number and low Bond number, at the jump the Weber number is of order unity while the Froude number is large, implying that the jump is controlled by surface tension. We also define a critical dimensionless jet flow rate at which this control no longer holds and
gravity plays a significant role.
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All authors Arnab Kumar Mallik, Hrvoje Jasak, D. Ian Wilson, P. F. Linden, Rajesh K. Bhagat
Fluid Dynamics
Stabilization of Yih's Viscosity Jump Interface in a Channel
Miroslav Krstic
Two immiscible viscous fluids in pressure-driven channel flow can be unstable through their interface when their viscosities differ, at arbitrarily small Reynolds number — the instability Yih found in 1967. The unstable state is the interface itself: a curve inside the domain, separating the two fluids, whose displacement is governed by a partial differential equation of its own and which moves the fluid domain with it. Actuation is at one wall only, so the state to be controlled is reached across a fluid. We stabilize this interface at any rate below the limit set by the streamwise mean flow, by static feedback of the two velocity components of that wall, through a Fredholm backstepping transformation acting jointly on the two layers. The target is the two-fluid Stokes problem, shifted, with the transmission of stress between the fluids kept and the coupling of the interface into them removed. Two findings about the two-fluid spectrum carry the design: joined at the interface, the
eigenvalue sequences of the two layers, which collide for a dense set of layer ratios when the layers are uncoupled, avoid each other uniformly, so no degeneracy has to be assigned; and the slowest mode left to viscosity is not a bulk mode but the capillary relaxation of the interface, whose rate is linear rather than quadratic in the wavenumber, which sets the band of actuated wavenumbers. The controller is tested on the nonlinear two-fluid channel, switched on against a saturated interfacial wave.
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Fluid Dynamics · Cross-listed from cond-mat.soft
Active colloidal rafts perform swimming strokes that propel their host droplets
Airi N. Kato, Julien Brémont, Etienne Harté et al. (+3 more)
Active particles confined in droplets can set their host droplet into motion. This phenomenon is usually attributed to direct hydrodynamic forcing by the enclosed particles. Here we reveal a different mechanism: we show that a self-propelled raft of active colloids confined in a thin oil droplet at the surface of water typically follows an off-centered orbit, thus periodically deforming the droplet's contact line in an anisotropic way. This non-reciprocal deformation acts as a swimming stroke and propels the droplet according to the principles of low-Reynolds-number swimming. The effect is absent for a single colloid and arises from the intrinsically many-body dynamics of the raft, which we capture with a dynamical model coupling viscous hydrodynamics and many-body active dynamics. Our results show how collective internal activity can be converted into locomotion through deformation of a soft confining boundary.
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All authors Airi N. Kato, Julien Brémont, Etienne Harté, Jean-Michel Rampnoux, Jean-François Joanny, Hamid Kellay
Fluid Dynamics
An improved periodic activation for PINNs reconstructing convective flows
Michael Mommert, Marie-Christine Volk and Christian Bauer
Architectures with periodic activation functions have already been shown to be beneficial in comparison to monotonic counterparts for a wide range of applications of physics-informed neural networks. Here, we investigate a network architecture which uses the complex exponential function, generating pairs of sine and cosine outputs as activation functions. Testing it against comparable, sine-activated multi-layer perceptrons for the task of temperature reconstruction from sparse velocity data for cubic Rayleigh-Bénard convection reveals significant improvements in the reconstruction quality without a substantial increase in computational cost per training step. Vice versa, the improved architecture enables reaching similar reconstruction qualities for a fraction of the expense. Analyzing the mathematical structure of these networks points to the improvements being rooted in the property of passing both a sine and cosine function forward. This way, the subsequent layer is able to adapt the phase of the provided latent periodic functions, and doing it individually for each of its
neurons.
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Fluid Dynamics · Cross-listed from eess.AS
Towards Physics-Informed Neural Networks for Stiff Guitar String Vibrations
Xinmeng Luan, Kensuke Okada, Ryoya Tabata et al. (+1 more)
Modeling stiff string vibrations is challenging due to their dispersive and high-frequency characteristics. This study investigates the effectiveness of Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) in simulating the transverse vibration of a one-dimensional linear stiff string with sharp initial conditions induced by plucking. The governing Partial Differential Equation (PDE), along with the associated initial and boundary conditions, is incorporated directly into the loss function of the neural network. For the reference measurements, a wire-breaking experiment was performed to excite the string, and its vibration response was captured using a
laser profiler. The comparison between experimental measurements, finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulations, and PINN-based simulations shows good overall agreement, highlighting the potential of PINNs for modeling stiff-string vibrations.
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All authors Xinmeng Luan, Kensuke Okada, Ryoya Tabata, Gary Scavone
Fluid Dynamics
A multi-scale approach for wall-bounded WCSPH–RANS simulations
Feng Wang, Nikolaus Adams and Xiangyu Hu
Achieving sufficient near-wall resolution remains challenging for wall-bounded
turbulence simulations using weakly compressible smoothed particle hydrodynamics (WCSPH), as local particle refinement imposes restrictive time-step requirements. This work proposes a multi-scale near-wall approach within the Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) framework to improve near-wall predictions without refining the SPH particle distribution. A local one-dimensional sublayer solver based on the simplified steady $k$–$\omega$ equations is coupled with each wall-adjacent fluid particle. A local flow-rate constraint and a friction-velocity-based iteration scheme are developed to close and solve the sublayer system, while a two-way shear-stress coupling with local feedback improves consistency between the two scales. The proposed approach is evaluated using turbulent straight-channel flows over a wide range of Reynolds numbers and a wavy-channel flow involving separation and recirculation. The results demonstrate improved near-wall velocity, turbulent kinetic energy and friction-coefficient predictions, satisfactory convergence, and good agreement with reference solutions. In particular, the approach improves the convergence of near-wall predictions where conventional wall treatments struggle to provide consistent results, and agrees closely with reference solutions at Reynolds numbers as high as $8.0 \times 10^{7}$ without near-wall particle refinement. For separated flow, convergence comparable to that of locally refined finite-volume simulations is obtained using an approximately uniform particle distribution. These improvements are achieved with limited computational overhead, supporting the application of particle-based methods to engineering flows involving wall-bounded
turbulence.
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Fluid Dynamics · Cross-listed from physics.app-ph
Liquid-Nitrogen Micropillar-Wick Cooling for Cryogenic Electronics: A Numerical Study of Thermal Performance and Capillary Dry-Out Limits
Felix Mende, Marcus Wislicenus, Dianping Jiang et al. (+2 more)
Cryogenic computing technologies are maturing rapidly, but heat removal remains a key challenge when increasing the device density and operating power. Two-phase evaporative cooling is a promising approach to solve this issue, because it can dissipate high heat fluxes while maintaining small temperature rises. Here, we numerically investigate
liquid-$\mathrm{N_2}$-filled silicon micropillar wicks as a capillary-fed thin-film evaporation concept for cryogenic electronics. The model combines Young-Laplace meniscus calculations, Hertz-Knudsen-Schrage evaporation, unit-
cell heat-transfer and
liquid-flow simulations, and an array-level thermal and capillary-flow model. For a representative geometry with a pillar diameter of $10\,\mu\mathrm{m}$, pitch of $24\,\mu\mathrm{m}$, and pillar height of $75\,\mu\mathrm{m}$ at an applied heat flux of $20\,\mathrm{W\,cm^{-2}}$, the predicted chip-temperature rise is approximately $2.7\,\mathrm{K}$. This is substantially below the estimated temperature rises for representative conduction cooling through an indium-interlayered copper heat sink and direct
liquid-$\mathrm{N_2}$ immersion. The corresponding predicted single-fed dry-out length is approximately $2.7\,\mathrm{mm}$, equivalent to an ideal double-fed coolable width of approximately $5.3\,\mathrm{mm}$. The results indicate that local thermal performance is favorable, whereas lateral scalability is primarily constrained by capillary dry-out. An approximate capillary-viscous scaling relation provides a compact framework for comparing dry-out limits across working fluids and related wick geometries and for identifying strategies to extend capillary-fed transport.
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All authors Felix Mende, Marcus Wislicenus, Dianping Jiang, Munehiro Tada, Lukas M. Eng
Fluid Dynamics
Periodic Neural Mapping for Unsteady Rotor-Blade Pressure and Aeroelastic Load Prediction
Lionel Salesses, Joachim Dominique, Tariq Benamara et al. (+2 more)
Accurate prediction of unsteady aerodynamic loads remains a major challenge in turbomachinery design. High-fidelity Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations are expensive, while aeroelastic Quantities of Interest (QoI) depend sensitively on the temporal
evolution of the pressure field. This work introduces periodic
Fourier Neural Mapping (p-FNM), a neural-operator framework for predicting unsteady pressure distributions on turbine rotor blades simulated using the chorochronic numerical hypothesis. The architecture embeds temporal periodicity into the model and learns a continuous mapping from operating conditions and time to pressure fields. Unlike sequential latent-space approaches, p-FNM predicts pressure fields independently at any time, avoiding error accumulation while preserving temporal continuity. The model is evaluated on a database of unsteady rotor-blade simulations and compared with a reduced-order baseline based on a variational autoencoder and recurrent neural network, refered as the Temporal Prediction Model (TPM). Performance is assessed for pressure fields and Generalized Aerodynamic Forces (GAFs), the primary aeroelastic QoI. Across all training
datasets, p-FNM consistently outperforms TPM. On the largest
dataset, p-FNM achieves a pressure-field mean absolute percentage error of 0.46% and a GAF-magnitude prediction error of 4.42%, corresponding to improvements of 60.7% and 77.6%, respectively. The minimum weighted phase error reaches 0.060 rad, demonstrating accurate preservation of the temporal characteristics of the aerodynamic response. The results show that GAF prediction is more challenging than pressure-field prediction and that temporal coherence is critical for accurately predicting spectral aerodynamic quantities. These findings demonstrate the potential of periodic neural operators for reduced-order modeling and aeroelastic analysis in turbomachinery.
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All authors Lionel Salesses, Joachim Dominique, Tariq Benamara, Théo Flament, Franck Mastrippolito
Fluid Dynamics
Relative velocity between a particle and turbulence
Yutaro Motoori, Daiki Watanabe and Susumu Goto
The relative velocity between a particle and the surrounding fluid is a key quantity that determines the various phenomena of particle-laden
turbulence, such as particle clustering and
turbulence modulation due to particles. We theoretically derive the expression for the relative velocity of a particle laden in
turbulence by extending the argument of Balachandar (2009). This derivation provides a simplified form of the analytical model of Berk and Coletti (2024), and it makes the underlying physical assumptions explicit. Using direct numerical simulation data of
turbulence in a periodic cube and turbulent channel flow, we demonstrate the validity of the derived expression, and show that it also holds for non-spherical particles and droplets.
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Fluid Dynamics
Optimization of fluid mixing by reinforcement learning using limit cycles of a dynamical system
Masaki Shimizu, Daiki Watanabe, Takumi Aoyagi et al. (+1 more)
We propose a method to overcome the difficulties encountered when applying reinforcement learning to fluid mixing processes. The proposed method has two main features: (i) it does not require detailed measurements of the flow state, and (ii) by effectively exploiting a stable limit cycle of a two-dimensional dynamical system (the Li'enard system), it can stably perform optimization without imposing explicit constraints on the control parameters. As an illustrative example, we optimize a process in which a fluid contained in a cylindrical vessel is mixed by periodically rotating the vessel. The resulting optimal vessel motion is physically reasonable: it reverses its direction of rotation before a solid-body rotation state is established. Furthermore, even when the fluid viscosity increases with time during the mixing process, the method can continuously adapt the control parameters to the changing viscosity.
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All authors Masaki Shimizu, Daiki Watanabe, Takumi Aoyagi, Susumu Goto
Fluid Dynamics · Cross-listed from math.AP
A variational model of nonlinear poroelasticity
James H. Adler, Xiaozhe Hu and Arkadz Kirshtein
We derive a thermodynamically-consistent model of fluid flow through a poroelastic medium. Starting from elastic and fluid free-energy densities, an energy-dissipation rate, and a kinematic constraint, the force-balance equations are derived using variational principles, with the pressure–density constitutive relation emerging as a direct consequence of the variational structure; the same kinematic constraint also supplies the total-flux transport structure. In the ideal-gas limit, the model linearization recovers the classical linear Biot equations. For power-law fluid energies, it yields isentropic pressure–density relations. A key advantage of the variational formulation is that extensions to richer physics, such as thermal effects, chemical reactions, or multi-component fluids, can be incorporated systematically by augmenting the energy and dissipation functionals without redesigning the force-balance or transport closure. We support the model with an energy-compatible two-field discretization and study consolidation under a surface load with three lateral-boundary treatments and three fluid-compressibility exponents.
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Fluid Dynamics
Discovery of an explicit closure dispersion model for contrast-agent transport in arteries
Yi-Teng Wang, Yu-Xing Gong, Yan Qiu et al. (+1 more)
At high Peclet number, the classical Taylor-Aris dispersion model becomes inadequate for early-time contrast-
agent transport in arteries, while an explicit closure model and a clear physical interpretation of this regime remain lacking. In this study, we develop a novel explicit-closure one-dimensional (1-D) effective dispersion model for this regime, with its functional structures identified through symbolic regression. Analysis of the resulting model reveals that, in the high-Peclet-number regime, axial transport is redistributed between the effective convection flux and the dispersive flux, resulting in a reduction of the effective convective transport velocity in the dispersion model. This redistribution gives rise to a transition from the classical quadratic scaling to a linear scaling of the effective diffusivity with radial Peclet number. Numerical validation demonstrates close agreement with the convection-
diffusion model over the investigated high-Peclet-number conditions, while the classical Taylor-Aris model exhibits substantial deviations. Application of the proposed model to averaged flow velocity inversion further demonstrates improved velocity estimation, particularly in the high-Peclet-number regime. These results highlight the importance of accounting for non-classical dispersion for reliable contrast-
agent-based arterial blood flow velocimetry and provide new insight into high-Peclet-number mass transport.
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All authors Yi-Teng Wang, Yu-Xing Gong, Yan Qiu, Kai-Rong Qin
Fluid Dynamics
Mathematical modeling on peristaltic flow of a Prandtl fluid with effects of slip conditions and inclined magnetic field
Sabia Asghar and Fred J. Vermolen
The manuscript provides a description of a theoretical analysis of a non-Newtonian Prandtl fluid subject to peristaltic flow through an inclined asymmetric channel. We explore the effect of an inclined
magnetic field on the peristaltic flow. This is relevant for applications involving fluid flow in narrow, inclined (tilted) tubes similar to blood vessels or the digestive system. The model also includes thermodynamic aspects such as heat
diffusion (the Soret effect) and viscous dissipation resulting from wall-fluid slip conditions, which may help optimize medical devices such as lab-on-a-chip systems and dialysis machines. In this study, the concentration of a generic chemical, temperature, and fluid velocity are taken into account through mass, heat, and momentum balances, respectively. The solution is approximated using numerical techniques suitable for long wavelengths (low frequency) and low Reynolds numbers. The study also discusses trapping phenomena, which are crucial from a clinical point of view. The developed insights can improve the understanding of physiological flows in the gastrointestinal tract and blood vessels. By understanding how the fluid moves and how particles are trapped, these insights may contribute to the design of improved medical pumps and artificial organs. Graphical visualizations are provided for the fluid velocity profile, temperature distribution, and concentration of a generic chemical. Furthermore, the numerical results are validated through comparison with a closed-form solution from a
benchmark problem.
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