Current Research

• Instabilities and nonlinear dynamics of polymeric fluid flows
• Turbulence and coherent structures in polymer solutions: bifurcation-theoretic approach
• Elasticity-driven instabilities in polymeric liquids: analysis and suppression
• Wall slip and viscoelastic flow instability in polymer melts and solutions

• Flow and transport fundamentals for complex fluids; applications in microfluidics and bioseparations
• Microstructural and multiscale simulations of polymeric liquids in flow (with J. J. de Pablo)
• Flow and transport driven by tunable surfactants (with N. L. Abbott)
• Two-fluid Taylor-Couette flow: Fluid dynamics and bioseparations

Group Members

• Graduate Students:
• Richard Jendrejack
• Philip Stone
• Guiyu Bai
• Chris Stoltz
• Wei Li
• Hongbo Ma
• Mauricio Lopez

• Undergraduate Students:
• Matt Porter
• Sichol Srithavatchai

Generous Benefactors

The background image is a Poincare map of fluid trajectories in a chaotic flow field, the ABC flow. Colors show the degree of extension of a polymer molecule (FENE dumbbell) in the flow -- green is relaxed, red is highly stretched. Because the flow field is Lagrangian chaotic, the stress field has a very rich structure.