FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS OF ANISOTROPIC FLUID SUSPENSIONS

The orientation tensor L is introduced to construct a modified Leslie–Ericksen model for the viscous, incompressible flow of anisotropic suspensions (including electric field effects). This is then utilized to develop a weak variational formulation and finite element scheme for computing the flow and orientation fields. Numerical results are presented for exploratory test problems.     

AN ENTROPY VARIABLE FORMULATION AND APPLICATIONS FOR THE TWO-DIMENSIONAL SHALLOW WATER EQUATIONS

A new symmetric formulation of the two-dimensional shallow water equations and a streamline upwind Petrov–Galerkin (SUPG) scheme are developed and tested. The symmetric formulation is constructed by means of a transformation of dependent variables derived from the relation for the total energy of the water column. This symmetric form is well suited to the SUPG approach as seen in analogous treatments of gas dynamics problems based on entropy variables. Particulars related to the construction of the upwind test functions and an appropriate discontinuity-capturing operator are included. A formal extension to the viscous, dissipative problem and a stability analysis are also presented. Numerical results for shallow water flow in a channel with (a) a step transition, (b) a curved wall transition and (c) a straight wall transition are compared with experimental and other computational results from the literature.     

Seiberg--Witten Monopoles in Three Dimensions

Dimensional reduction of the Seiberg--Witten equations leads to the equations of motion of a U(1) Chern--Simons theory coupled to a massless spinorial field. A topological quantum field theory is constructed for the moduli space of gauge equivalence classes of solutions of these equations. The Euler characteristic of the moduli space is obtained as the partition function which yields an analogue of Casson's invariant.A mathematically rigorous definition of the invariant isdeveloped for homology spheres using the theory of spectral flow ofself-adjoint Fredholm operators.