-----------------------------------------------------------

Summer Program Seminars 2006

Tuesday, July 18, 2006 @ 10:00AM
Cullimore Hall, Room 611
New Jersey Institute of Technology

Novel Filament Dynamics in Complex Fluid

Yuan Young

Department of Mathematical Sciences

New Jersey Institute of Technology

Newark, New Jersey

ABSTRACT

I will discuss a fundamental problem in complex fluid dynamics, motivated by experimental work by V. Steinberg and his collaborators on "low Reynolds turbulence" in elastic flows, in which they use fluorescent DNA molecules to investigate stretch-coil transitions in strongly mixing elastic flows.  In joint work with M. Shelley we consider the much simpler problem of an elastic fiber moving in a background cellular flow.  The fiber acts as a spatially extended test particle whose internal dynamics, particularly buckling at hyperbolic points, leads to complex transport properties across space. We also investigate the associated extra stress fields produced by a test particle