Professor Brian Edwards has been elected as a 2024 Fellow of the Society of Rheology, a global organization of more than 2,000 engineers, physicists, chemists, and mathematicians dedicated to the advancement and understanding of fundamental physical properties of fluids under flow.
Edwards, one of seven Fellows in the 2024 class, is only the second UT representative to earn the honor (Bamin Khomami, 2019). Edwards was cited for seminal contributions to non-equilibrium thermodynamics of flowing systems and its application to liquid crystals and entangled polymeric solutions and melts.
“It is very humbling to be joining such a great group of outstanding scholars of rheology and fluid mechanics,” Edwards said. “It is very gratifying to be recognized by the people who are the most knowledgeable on the subject, and whose work I have admired since the start of my career thirty years ago.”
Throughout his career, Edwards has been fascinated by the theory and application of nonequilibrium thermodynamics to the rheology and fluid mechanics of complex fluids. His early work focused on deriving and formalizing a Hamiltonian-based description of the underlying mathematical and thermodynamic structure of flow and transport phenomena, culminating in the monograph Thermodynamics of Flowing Systems, coauthored with University of Delaware Professor Antony Beris and published by Oxford University Press in 1994.
As a result of this work, Edwards and Beris derived the first complete tensorial model of liquid crystal (LC) dynamics incorporating all the physical coupled transport processes known to occur in these complicated materials, including Frank distortion energy, Landau free energy, nematic and cholesteric distributional ordering, thereby extending and unifying other LC theories, including the Leslie-Ericksen and Doi models. The resulting model, commonly referred to as the “Beris-Edwards model,” has been used as the basis for most LC dynamics theoretical studies over the past twenty years.
Edwards will be honored at the 95th Annual Meeting of The Society of Rheology October 13–17 in Austin, Texas, where he will deliver a presentation on his recent research, The role of Kuhn segment extension in flow induced crystallization under uniaxial elongational flow. This work employs massively parallelized simulations to visualize and conceptualize the combined effects of flow type and rate on the topological properties of the constituent polymer molecules used in typical industrial processing operations.
Contact
Rhiannon Potkey (865-974-0683, rpotkey@utk.edu)