U.S.-Switzerland Cooperative Research: Stochastic Simulation of Transport Phenomena

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9312811 DePablo This award supports Dr. Juan DePablo and two graduate students of the University of Wisconsin to collaborate in theoretical chemical engineering research with Professor Hans C. Oettinger of the Polymer Institute of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Professor Oettinger is a world-renown authority in the mathematical aspects of stochastic methods, and his institution has some of the world's fastest supercomputers. The Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin is one of the world's foremost centers for the development and application of the theory of transport phenomena to the solution of chemical engineering problems. These complementary strengths are well suited to the goal of their collaboration, which is to develop stochastic methods to the point where they become a standard tool for the solution of problems in transport phenomena. They will do this by investigating the mathematical foundations of such methods and by applying these to a wide variety of engineering applications, beginning with the rheological behavior of polymer melts after cessation of different types of flows. They will compare their theoretical work with experimental data generated by colleagues of Professor Oettinger at ETH-Zurich. Stochastic methods are playing an increasingly important role in the solution of complex, multidimensional problems. They were first developed and are now widely used in physics and mathematics, but this sophisticated mathematical approach has not been fully exploited in chemical engineering. Stochastic methods are remarkably simple compared to some other methods, and they appear to work in some complex problems resistant to traditional analytical treatment. On the other hand, they are not always superior to numerical methods. Substantial work, such as that proposed here, is necessary to explore the advantages and practical applications in chemical engineering. ***