COMPUTATIONAL RESEARCH in BOSTON and BEYOND (CRIBB)

Date March 5, 2021
Speaker Kevin Silmore Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Topic Buckling, Crumpling, and Tumbling of Semiflexible Sheets in Simple Shear Flow
Abstract As 2D materials such as graphene, transition metal dichalcogenides, and 2D polymers become more prevalent, solution processing and colloidal-state properties are being exploited to create advanced and functional materials. However, our understanding of the fundamental behavior of 2D sheets and membranes in fluid flow is still lacking. In this work, we perform numerical simulations of athermal semiflexible sheets with hydrodynamic interactions in shear flow. For sheets initially oriented in the flow-gradient plane, we find buckling instabilities of different mode numbers that vary with bending stiffness and can be understood with a quasi-static model of elasticity. For different initial orientations, chaotic tumbling trajectories are observed.
Biography Kevin Silmore is a Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellow and PhD Candidate in Chemical Engineering and Computation at MIT. Working with James Swan and Michael Strano, his research lies at the intersection of nanomaterials, soft matter physics, and numerical methods development. Kevin graduated with a BSE in Chemical and Biological Engineering from Princeton University in 2016.

Archives

Acknowledgements

We thank the generous support of MIT IS&T, CSAIL, and the Department of Mathematics for their support of this series.

MIT Math CSAIL EAPS Lincoln Lab Harvard Astronomy

Accessibility