Past Event: Oden Institute Seminar

Swimmers at low Reynolds number: Design, optimization and many-body simulation

Shravan Veerapaneni, University of Michigan

Abstract

We will review a suite of recent advances in numerical algorithms that enabled rapid simulation capabilities for collective motion of microswimmers at scale. A central building block is a collision-resolution algorithm that overcomes the numerical constraints arising from particle collisions, which extends the well-known complementarity method for non-smooth multi-body dynamics to fluid-structure interaction problems. New mathematical tools will be presented for solving the close evaluation problem that arises due to close hydrodynamic interaction between the microswimmers. Applications to shape optimization, design of phoretic particles and physical insights into collective phenomena will be discussed. 

Biography

Shravan Veerapaneni received a BTech from IIT-Madras and a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics from the University of Pennsylvania. After three years as a Research Scientist at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, he joined the University of Michigan, where he is now a Professor of Mathematics. He received a NSF Career Award, Ralph E Powe Junior Faculty Award and was a member of the team that won the ACM Gordon Bell Prize in 2010. His group works on developing scalable classical--and recently, quantum---numerical algorithms and  applications in biophysics, terramechanics and fluid mechanics.