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Thin film flow on surfaces containing arbitrary occlusions

Presents collaborative research with the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. It develops the first model for thin film flow past arbitrary occlusions and extends lubrication methods to more practically-important flows (e.g. pesticides on foliage) where the occlusions are much taller than the characteristic film thickness. A spatially- and temporally-adaptive multigrid approach is developed which is capable of providing the required local grid resolution near occlusions without rendering the flow problems computational infeasible. This is the first study to provide the efficiency needed to obtain grid-independent solutions for thin film flows over the highly heterogeneous substrates encountered throughout science and engineering.