Complex flows of micro/nano structured fluids: Reinforced polymer composites

Overview & Synopsis

The motion of an ellipsoidal particle immersed in a flow of a Newtonian fluid was obtained in the pioneering work of Jeffery in 1922. Suspensions of industrial interest usually involve particles with a variety of shapes. Moreover, suspensions composed of rods (a limit case of an ellipsoid) aggregate, leading to clusters with particular shapes that exhibit, when immersed in a flow, an almost rigid motion. In this work, we revisit the modeling and simulation of suspensions involving rods throughout the different scales of description (microscopic, mesoscopic and macroscopic) and the different concentration regimes: dilute, semi-dilute, semi-concentrated and concentrated, involving gradually richer physics.