This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Non-Newtonian fluids or complex fluids are abundant in our daily lives. Examples of such fluids include molten plastics, engine oils with polymeric additives, paints, egg white and blood. Breakthrough technology can come from experiments or through utilization of new modeling methods that have the potential to provide rapid screening of possible processes. More likely is that simulation will play a greater role in providing a fundamental understanding of the breakthrough technology. Capturing this fundamental understanding with models provides the connectivity between an actual practical operating device and fundamental mechanistic information and allows for a more realistic assessment of process viability. Models provide the basis of extending the operating parameter space and have a significant impact on the decision to build the full scale and on the nature of the ultimate design.
The accurate design, efficient implementation, and the use of numerical methods for the computer simulation of such important fields as non-Newtonian mechanics will result in significant applications. The computational modeling package, once established, will be made for the public use.
