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SIAM "Bridging the Gap" Seminar on November 30

November 26, 2018

Join Northwestern’s student chapter of SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Math) for the first “Bridging the Gap” seminar of the year. Lunch will be provided.

Overview
This seminar is designed to highlight the broad applications of mathematics to diverse disciplines. The talks will be tailored to be understandable to a general audience without field-specific knowledge. There will be presentations from two speakers:

  • Rebecca Harmon
    Watching paint dry (on the computer): Enhancing the kinetic modeling of the drying process of oil paint
    A painting on the wall seems inert, but within the thin layers is chemistry that never stops. Once paint leaves the tube, thousands of reactions begin to link oil molecules together into the familiar dry film. The paint will continue to cure and age over time, generating tens to hundreds of thousands of unique chemical species and reactions. This large, complex system requires computational tools to handle the scale and diversity of products and their reaction kinetics. In this talk, Rebecca will explain how automated reaction network generation and modeling the chemistry in oil paintings can validate proposed reaction mechanisms and predict the future condition of works of art for conservators to maintain cultural heritage objects.
  • Cody Reeves 
    Active suspension of self-rotating particles
    Suspensions of self-propelled particles, such as bacteria, have received considerable attention. Recently, there has been increased interest in suspensions of self-rotating particles, such as Quincke rotors in electric fields and ferromagnetic colloids in alternating magnetic fields. While the individual particles are governed by relatively simple dynamics, the interaction of the particles can result in incredibly complex and interesting phenomena. Experiments show phase separation, macroscopic directed motion, and structure formation (e.g., vortices and asters). Modeling these systems as discrete particles at the micro-scale (Yeo et al, Physical Review Letters (2015)) is computationally expensive and limits the study of the rotors collective dynamics. We develop a continuum model for such rotor systems based on derivation for dielectric fluids with internal rotation (Rosensweig, The Journal of Chemical Physics (2004)). This model allows us to study properties of the fluid and the existence of active turbulence caused by the rotors. To study the effect of confinement, we include a phase parameter to restrict the rotors inside a region with a defined diffuse interface. We then can study the interaction between the rotors and the interface for both a fixed and deformable interface.

Categories: Around Campus, STEM