Active materials and reactive fluids consists of those materials that consume  or convert energy to generate motion and deformations.They are involved in almost all  biological activities and in most time, the principle characteristics of living organisms.In this talk, we will present  general energetic variational approaches to study these important mechanisms.This thermodynamics consistent framework will be extended to those with various biological relevant ingredients, including the temperature effects, cross-scale coupling (including bulk-interface interaction) and most of all, chemical reactions.We will first discuss a derivation and generalization of  the mass action kinetics  of chemical reactions.Then we will also demonstrate several applications under this framework, in particular,  the modeling of wormlike micellar solutions.This is a joint work with  Bob Eisenberg, Pei Liu, Yiwei Wang and Tengfei Zhang.

Bio:
Chun Liu is the Chair and Professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics in Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.Before coming to Illinois Tech in 2017, Liu was in the Department of Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University for 18 years.He also served a term as associate director for the Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications (IMA)at the University of Minnesota, and has held positions at many institutions, such as the University of Wuerzburg,the University of Tokyo, the University of Georgia, and Carnegie Mellon University. He received his Ph.D.in 1995 from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. Liu's research is in nonlinear partial differential equations and applications in complex fluids,such as liquid crystal growth, polymers, and charged particles in cell membranes.He developed a general framework of energetic variational approaches (EnVarA) to study various problems arising from physical and biological applications.  Liu's research has been supported by various federal and international funding agencies.