Title:  Active Materials and Reactive Fluids: The Energetic Variational Approach
Abstract:  In this talk I will present a general theory for active materials which convert chemical energy into various type of mechanical energy. Such materials are important and common in applications, especially in biology and physiology, such as cancer tumor growth, muscle contraction and mitochondrion. The approach is the extension of the classical energetic variational methods for mechanical systems. The framework covers a wide range of both chemical reaction kenetics and mechanical processes, as well as their biological and physical applications. This is a joint project with many collaborators, in particular, Bob Eisenberg, Yiwei Wang and Tengfei Zhang.