Biography

I have been interested in working with research in Fluid Mechanics since I did my first Fluid Mechanics course as an undergraduate student of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Brasília. I was fascinated on the beauty of the equations that govern the complex motion of a fluid and its wide range of applications.

During my studies to obtain a Master Degree I worked with numerical simulations of turbulent flows with heat transfer in detached boundary layers using a research code that started to be developed in France (by my supervisor, Prof. Jose Luiz Alves da Fontoura Rodrigues, Docteur, at the École Centrale de Lyon). The code is Finite Element based and uses Reynolds Average Navier Stokes (RANS) methodology. In that period, I focused my efforts in understanding the near wall behavior and explored momentum/heat transfer analogies in turbulent wall flows.

In my doctoral thesis, I decided to explore new horizons and studied in details the behavior of micro and nanometric magnetic particles suspended in a Newtonian carrier liquid. For this purpose I developed a numerical research code (from zero) in Fortran that is capable to compute the motion of N suspended particles in a viscous fluid subjected to Brownian motion, net buoyancy forces (for sedimentation problems), and also magnetic and hydrodynamic interactions. My code is Langevin Dynamics based, it also accounts for particle rotational motion due to magnetic torques. These magnetic and hydrodynamic interactions are computed using a sophisticated technique of Ewald sums. My numerical code is also capable of simulating magnetic fluids subjected to simple and oscillatory shears (for rheology studies). I can also simulate monodisperse and polydisperse suspensions.

Besides the development of this code I also explored the behavior of diluted suspensions of magnetic spheres using a two particle model, trying to understand the process of particle dispersion and aggregation induced by magnetic interactions observing the breaking of reversibility in the particles trajectories. This study originated two papers, published during the period of my thesis.

I have also been working with the macroscopic system of non-linear partial differential equations that governs the motion of magnetic fluids with non-symmetric stresses. Today the primary focus of my research is the hydrodynamics of magnetic fluids. This branch may be opened in several topics such as rheology of complex fluids, microhydrodynamics, electromagnetism, modeling of nonlinear systems, fluid displacement in low gravity environments and so on.

I like challenges and I do believe that we still have several open questions that need to be answered in the field of hydrodynamics of magnetic fluids. I hope to contribute with the state of art of this field through my future works by focusing in trying to answer some of these questions. I strongly believe that I could use my skills for the production of high quality science in the process of trying to reach an insight on some of today's open questions in my research field.