Achievement

IGERT Trainee George Mohler’s work looks at field-theoretic models, which replace interactions between polymers with interactions between polymers and one or more conjugated fields. This approach has been used to investigate a wide range of polymer formulations at equilibrium. George worked with an inhomogeneous melt of elastic dumbbell polymers to derive a model that incorporates thermodynamic forces into a two-fluid model. The resulting equations are composed of a system of 4th order PDEs coupled with a non-linear, non-local optimization problem. George was able to overcome the numerical challenges of the model by designing a robust semi-implicit method based on linear asymptotic behavior of the leading order terms at small scales, by exploiting the exponential structure of global operators, and by parallelizing the nonlinear optimization problem.