Professor Narayan Aluru
Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering, Computational Science and Engineering, Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801
When:
10:00-11:00 a.m.; Friday, November 22
Where:
405 John D. Tickle Engineering Building
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, dynamics, 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.
Biography:
Professor Narayan Aluru is the Kritzer Professor in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He also serves as the Director of the Computational Science and Engineering Graduate Program and is a full-time faculty in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at Illinois. Professor Aluru received his PhD from Stanford University, obtained a MS degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and earned a Bachelor’s of Engineering at Birla Institute of Technology & Science in India. A fellow of USACM and ASME, Professor Aluru is the recipient of many prestigious awards, including the NSF Career Award (1999), Xerox Faculty Award at Illinois (2002), the ASME Gustus L. Larson Memorial Award (2006), College of Engineering Teaching Excellence Award (2012), and the Engineering Council Award for Excellence in Advising (2012). Professor Aluru also serves as subject editor for the IEEE/ASME Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems and sits on the editorial board of many other journals in the fields of computational science and mechanics.