5:25 PM – 5:45 PM, Tuesday, October 16, 2018; Room: 114 McAllister bldg.

A PDE model of a swimmer in Liquid Crystal

Hai Chi, The Pennsylvania State University, USA

Living Liquid Crystal (LLC) is a new kind of active material which reveals many interesting physical phenomena. Its modeling, numerical simulations and analysis also require more advanced mathematical tools. We study a model describing the behavior of an active swimmer suspended in Liquid Crystal (LC) which couples the Edwards-Beris PDE model and Squirmer model for LC and active swimmer. With the consideration of a special kind of surface anchoring, we found that by increasing the surface anchoring strength to a critical value, one can qualitatively change the stable swimming direction of squirmer. Moreover, our analytical studies (in progress) of our model is aimed at global existence and long-time behavior. This is a joint work with Lei Zhang, Leonid Berlyand and Igor Aronson.

Schedule of Workshop “Mathematics of Living Matter”
Home Page of Workshop “Mathematics of Living Matter”