8:30 AM-9:30 AM
Room: Ballrooms I, II, & III
Chair: Raymond Goldstein, University of Arizona
Many complex materials such as polymers and liquid crystal polymers are processed as "melts" in special geometries and flows, both for technological purposes (super-strength materials) and in natural biological functions (spiders spinning silk). Molecular-scale orientation interacts with the flow and any free surface effects, yielding remarkable phenomena which are difficult to explain. The speaker will describe constitutive laws for flows of rod-like molecules, and then apply the moment averaged equations of Doi and co-workers to probe two phenomena rich in dynamical systems flavor: microstructural suppression of the Rayleigh capillary instability, and the classical isotropic-to-nematic phase transition in the presence of an imposed flow.
M. Gregory Forest
Department of Mathematics
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
MMD, 2/9/99