Seminar: Nanoscale Hydrodynamics

Abstract

Understanding fluid physics at nanometer scale is important for many applications including water purification, gas separations, energy storage, DNA sequencing, etc. Molecular scale phenomena such as finite size of the molecule compared to the pore/slit size, restricted translational and rotational motions, ballistic diffusion, etc. pose challenges to the classical continuum theory of fluids. To overcome the limitations of the classical theory, molecular approaches such as quantum techniques, molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo methods are popularly used. However, these approaches are limited to small length and short time scales. Here, we discuss the development of a quasi-continuum theory to predict the structure and transport of confined fluids. Quasi-continuum theory seamlessly integrates molecular scale physics into classical theory and we demonstrate the accuracy of the approach by considering several examples.

About the Speaker

N. R. Aluru received the B.E. degree from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, India, in 1989, the M.S. degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, in 1991, and the Ph.D. degree from Stanford University, Stanford, CA, in 1995.

He is currently a Richard W. Kritzer Professor in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and Director of the Computational Science and Engineering Program at Illinois. He is also affiliated with the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the Bioengineering Department at UIUC. He was a Postdoctoral Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, from 1995 to 1997. In 1998, he joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) as an Assistant Professor.

Hosted by Professor Shaurya Prakash