• Class schedule:  Thursday, Feb. 6th, 2014, from 12:00 pm to 01:00 pm
• Location: Building 9, Level 2, Room 2322  (Lecture Hall)
• Refreshments: Pizza and Soft Drinks available @11:50 am

Abstract
Multilayered energetic structures support self-propagating reaction fronts that travel at speeds that can exceed 10m/s.  The fronts are driven by heat released through atomic mixing between the constituents of individual layers.  While the dynamics of such fronts can be described by deceptively simple mathematical models, numerical simulation faces severe challenges due to the large scale ratios that characterize the system.  This talk shall outline the mathematical models, development and implementation of solution schemes that defeat the stiffness of the governing equations, as well as multiscale approaches that are currently being pursued in order to inform model construction and to plan experimental measurements.


Biography
Omar Knio is a Professor of Applied Mathematics and Computational Science, and Deputy Director of the Strategic Research Initiative Center for Uncertainty Quantification in Computational Science and Engineering.  He is also a member of the Clean Combustion Research Center.  Prof. Knio received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering in 1990 from MIT.  He held a postdoctoral associate position at MIT, before joining the Mechanical Engineering Faculty at Johns Hopkins University in 1991.  In 2011, he joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Duke, where he serves as Director of the Pratt School of Engineering Initiative on Uncertainty and Risk, and as Associate Director of the Center for Material Genomics. In 2012, Prof. Knio was awarded the Edmund T. Pratt, Jr., named chair in Pratt School of Engineering at Duke. Prof. Knio held a visiting professor position at the Ecole Centrale de Lyon in 1993, 1994, 1995, and 2001, and at the Université du Havre in 1997.   He was visiting lecturer at the Institut für Technische Mechanik in Aachen, Germany, in 1994, and also held visiting scientist positions at Sandia National Laboratories from 1996-2001, and at the Free University in Berlin in 1999 and 2000.  Prof. Knio co-founded Reactive NanoTechnologies Inc., in 2001, and has served as its Senior Vice President from 2001-2008. Prof. Knio is the recipient of an Associated Western Universities Faculty Fellowship Award in 1996, a Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Award in 2003, an R&D100 Award in 2005, and a Distinguished Alumnus Award from the American University of Beirut in 2005.  He currently serves on the Editorial Boards of Theoretical and Computational Fluid Dynamics, and of SIAM/ASA Journal on Uncertainty Quantification.  He has co-authored over 100 archival journal papers, two books, and is an inventor on 12 patents.