"All models are wrong but some are useful"
~ George Box
The homepage serves as an annotated bibliography for some of our group's recent projects, complete with recorded presentations. Navigate the webpage to learn more!
Living Polymers
Do shear stresses decrease when flow causes polymers to get shorter? To explore this, we develop new tools for "reactive rheology", applying population balance equations to the constitutive equation. What we find, in short, is that polymers do not get shorter unless they are more stressed... in which decreasing length always corresponds (perhaps surprisingly) to increasing stress.
Multi-Fluid Models
For a fluid at rest, a mixture of polymer chains with differing lengths but similar chemistry (e.g. all PS monomers) is thermodynamically stable. When flow is applied, however, stresses are divided unequally between long/short chains and a demixing instability can ensue! We develop a multi-fluid model to explore this in more detail, and we validate a back-of-the-envelope calculations that shows these demixing instabities are enhanced by high entanglement and high polydispersity.
Epidemic Modeling
By now, we are all arm-chair experts in epidemiology, well-versed in the standard SIR model. But where does this artifically discrete and memoryless "infected" compartment come from - and is there a better way to build these models?