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.