|
|
Prof. Andrew Belmonte
W. G. Pritchard Laboratories
Dept of Mathematics / Dept of Materials Science & Engineering
Pennsylvania State University, USA
|
Abstract: Viscoelastic fluids sometimes undergo qualitatively different instabilities than Newtonian (Navier-Stokes) fluids, and free surface flows are known to be sensitive to the boundary conditions which occur at the deformable boundary separating the different fluid domains. I will present an overview of a particularly fascinating viscoelastic fluid, comprised at the microscale of long tubelike micellar aggregates which form in the presence of cosurfactant organic salts or oils. Our experimental results focus on situations in which the viscoelastic material is produced in a reaction at the fluid interface, which separates two Newtonian fluids. I will also present our variational model which provides a general framework for these fluids, and explains some of the observations in terms of a curvature-dependent boundary elasticity.
About the Speaker: Andrew Belmonte has long worked at the intersection of mathematics and the world to which it can be applied. He received his PhD in Physics at Princeton University (1994), and was awarded a Chateaubriand Fellowship and an NSF International Fellowship to study at the Institut Non-Lineaire de Nice in France for two years, after which he was a postdoc at the University of Pittsburgh. In 1998 he became a faculty member at Penn State University, where he currently works in the W.G. Pritchard Laboratories. He was the recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship (2000), an NSF CAREER Award (2001), and has been a visiting professor at the ESPCI in Paris, France (2004) and at Harvard University (SEAS, 2007). His current interests include evolutionary game theory, and cancer modeling.
Date&Time: June 12, 2014 (Thursday), 10:00 - 11:00 a.m.
Location: 606 Conference Room
