2008-09 IAM-PIMS-MITACS Distinguished Colloquium Series - 02

Fluids with suspended microstructure – complex fluids – are common in micro- and biofluidics and can have fascinating dynamical behaviors. I will overview modeling and simulation studies of transport and mixing in complex fluids. These studies will illustrate how microscopic fibers can become random walkers by dint of their internal degrees of freedom, how intrinsic oscillations of a driven viscoelastic fluid can mix a fluid at low Reynolds number, and how hydrodynamically mediated interactions among many small swimmers can drive, or damp out, large-scale roiling flows.