William R. Schowalter Lecture

This lecture honors the distinguished career of William R. Schowalter, whose accomplishments span seminal research in fluid mechanics, visionary academic leadership as department chair at Princeton and dean of engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and high-level international engagement as senior adviser to three presidents at the National University of Singapore and King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.

 

Bill's accomplishments span seminal research in fluid mechanics, visionary academic leadership as department chair at Princeton and dean of engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and high-level international engagement as senior adviser to three presidents at the National University of Singapore and King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.

 

Reflecting Bill’s broad contributions to chemical engineering, the lecture’s focus will alternate on a yearly basis between fluid mechanics research, broadly understood to include complex fluids and soft condensed matter, and typically delivered by an academic speaker, and topics of general interest to our profession, the latter typically delivered by an industrial speaker.

 

The William R. Schowalter lecture will be given by Eric S.G. Shaqfeh, Lester Levi Carter Professor of Engineering, Stanford University.

 

Rigid or flexible particles suspended in viscoelastic fluids are ubiquitous in the food industry (e.g. pastes), industrial molding applications (all composites and 3-D printed parts), the energy industry (e.g. fracking fluids), and biological fluids (i.e. swimming of bacteria in mucous). Bill Schowalter was a pioneer in examining these suspensions particularly examining porous media flows and drop flows in elastic liquids in the 70’s and 80’s. The mathematical description of these suspensions is remarkably still in its infancy, but a the real breakthrough in this area has been the development of 3D computational simulations of such viscoelastic suspensions including particle motion and particle level resolution of the elastic flow fields. These simulations will allow the principles which govern the simplest flows of such suspensions, which are now generally not understood, to become elucidated in the next decade. I will describe two problems that have been recently analyzed using these computational methods – including the shear thickening of such suspensions in model synovial fluids and the design of a mechanical swimmer that is sensitive to elastic fluid rheology.