SCS colloquium: Modelling coral growth in the presence of hydrodynamic

Day: Friday 13-11-09
Time: 16:00-17:00
Place: room F0.13

Program:

-Speaker: Nol Chindapol (SCS, UvA)

Title: Modelling coral growth in the presence of hydrodynamic

Summary:

Growth in coral colonies is strongly influenced  by the effect of hydrodynamics.

Corals can adapt their shape to the environment. In order to study the effect of

this, a computational model must capture the result of hydrodynamics.

In this model it is required to solve the Navier-Stokes equation (NVS)

and advection diffusion equation (ADE) in order to

couple the transport of nutrients in the presence of flow. The existing model of

the coral morphology based on Polyp Oriented Radiate Accretive Growth (PORAG)

has been used to study the growth of coral under diffusion-limited

conditions. In this project we want to include the impact of hydrodynamics

on the simulated growth process. 

The effect of hydrodynamics was computed by using COMSOL multi-physics

which is a commercial software package widely used in various modeling problems in

science and engineering applications. The results are exported to the PORAG

model and the coupling between the COMSOL software and PORAG

is implemented in a MATHLAB script which interfaces with

COMSOL. The range of the morphologies resulting from the simulations so far

is based on the solving the ADE only without coupling the NVS for the

purpose of rapid prototyping. There might be some preliminary resultS of

coupling between NVS and ADE in the upcoming colloquium.