Energetic Variational Approaches in Complex Fluids

Complex fluids is ubiquitous in our daily life, from the food we eat, the things we use to the exact materials we are made of. It is also important in many industrial, physical and biological applications. Studying these materials requires a wide range of tools and techniques for different disciplinary, even within mathematics.

It is the competitions and couplings of different physics from multiple scales that give the complex fluids many interesting properties and applications. In this talk, I will demonstrate how to establish these coupling systems using energetic variational approaches.
These approaches are motivated by well-established works of Rayleigh, Landau and most of all, Onsager. In particular, we will emphasize the relations between those of kinematics and energetics. Such a framework not only are useful in the modeling, but also play important role in analysis as well as designing corresponding numerical algorithms.