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On Monday, May 23, 2016, Howard A. Stone, Donald R. Dixon '69 and Elizabeth W. Dixon Professor in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Chair, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, will give the W.N. Lacey Lectureship in Chemical Engineering at Caltech.
Thinking about some new low Reynolds number flow problems (technical lecture)
I describe two kinds of low Reynolds number flows where we have sought to identify new solutions. First, it is well known that the flow of thin liquid films has a large research literature in fluid mechanics. Also, the bending of an elastic beam has a large research literature in elasticity. Here we combine thw two problems to study the spreading of a liquid over an elastic beam – the spreading fluid changes the shape of the beam and, in turn, the bending of the beam occurs when laser heating of a dilute suspension occurs. The viscosity varies with position about the particle which changes the familiar hydrodynamic drag. We present a solution using the Reciprocal Theorem so as to bypass many of the usual calculations.