Invited Speakers
Virgil Adumitroaie
Data Scientist, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
PRESENTATION: Phase Equilibrium Calculations Applied to Cloud Modeling of Gas-Giant Planets
Virgil Adumitroaie received his Ph. D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University at Buffalo in 1997, for research performed in simulation and modeling of high-speed turbulent reacting flows. He served for six years as a Senior Engineer at the CFD Research Corporation, Huntsville, AL prior to joining the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a Senior Member of Technical Staff in 2004, and USC as Adjunct Lecturer in 2006. He has published papers and technical reports on advanced modeling of compressible flows, direct numerical simulations and large eddy simulations (LES) of chemically reacting flows, magnetohydrodynamics, decision support for technology portfolio investments, and giant planets atmospheric and magnetospheric modeling. During his career he has been involved in turbulent combustion modeling, data dimension reduction, neural networks, signaling pathways and scientific software development. At JPL, his work in optimization methods and uncertainty analysis applied to decision problems supported tasks from the JPL’s Strategic Technologies Program Office. He was part of the Sounder PEATE software development team in the Suomi NPP project. Currently, as Data Scientist, he develops outer planetary environment models and radiation monitoring software for the Juno Mission.
Abstract of the talk:
Phase Equilibrium Calculations Applied to Cloud Modeling of Gas-Giant Planets
Virgil Adumitroaie
PhD, Data Scientist, University of Southern California,
Los Angeles, CA, USA
Abstract: Gas giant planet atmospheres are composed primarily of hydrogen and helium along with trace constituents including methane, ammonia, water vapor, hydrogen sulfide, phosphine and others. Since the seminal work of Lewis (1969), many researchers have used 1-D adiabatic atmospheric models to calculate solid and liquid cloud structures in the giant planets. In this talk, traditional modeling approaches for solution clouds are updated to state-of-the-art techniques derived from fundamental principles governing the vapor-liquid equilibrium (VLE) conditions. The technique is discussed from the perspective of binary mixtures with the anticipation that it can be generalized for multi-component mixtures. As a purposeful illustration, up-to-date thermodynamic properties of water and ammonia mixtures are used to investigate the aqueous ammonia clouds on Jupiter. Comparison with an established method is presented, along with the description of a new procedure applied to modeling of Jupiter’s atmosphere.
Keywords: gas-giant planets, Jupiter atmosphere, modeling, phase equilibrium, vapor liquid equilibrium (VLE)
PARTNERS
