UU Mathematics colloquium: Contactless rebound of elastic bodies in a viscous incompressible fluid

Coffee and “fikabröd” is served at the lecture hall at 15.15 and the talk will start roughly 15.30.

Abstract: In the lecture the phenomenon of particle rebound in a fluid environment is investigated. We focus on the important case of incompressible fluids with no-slip boundary conditions, for which it is known that collisions of smooth particles cannot occur in finite time. Motivated by the desire to understand this fascinating yet counterintuitive fluid-structure interaction, a reduced model is introduced. In this simplified framework, conditions are given, which allow to prove that rebound is possible even in the absence of a topological contact. The results lead to conjecture that a qualitative change in the shape of the solid is necessary and sufficient for obtaining a physically meaningful rebound.