The seminar “Modelling of materials – theory, model reduction and efficient numerical methods” will take place every Wednesday from 9:00 in lecture room K3 and will also be streamed on Zoom. The first talk (October 4) will be given by Endre Süli. Please see the details below.
Speaker: Endre Süli
Title: Kinetic Models of Dilute Polymeric Fluids: Analysis and Approximation
Abstract: Since the pioneering contributions of Werner Kuhn, Hans Kramers and other scientists working at the interface of polymer chemistry and statistical physics during the first half of the twentieth century, kinetic models have been widely and successfully used to describe the motion of polymeric fluids.
The aim of this talk is to review recent results concerning the mathematical analysis of these models. We focus in particular on questions of existence of large-data global weak solutions to kinetic
models of dilute polymeric fluids – a system of nonlinear partial differential equations involving the compressible or incompressible Navier-Stokes equations, modelling the evolution of the velocity field and the pressure, coupled to a Fokker-Planck equation satisfied by the probability density function for the random configuration vectors associated with the directions of the backbones of noninteracting polymer molecules suspended in a Newtonian fluid. We shall also discuss the numerical solution of this coupled system of partial differential equations and will highlight some nontrivial open problems.