Assoc Professor Peter Daivis

Qualifications

• PhD, (Physics), Massey University (New Zealand), 1990
• Master of Applied Science, RMIT, 1984
• Graduate Diploma of Applied Colloid Science, Swinburne Institute of Technology, 1982
• Bachelor of Applied Science, RMIT, 1980

Summary of Academic Activities

• Teaching/Work responsibilities
• Service physics coordinator
• Postgraduate student supervisor and researcher
• Cooperative Research Centre for Polymers
• Research Interests
• Polymer and Colloid physics
• Computer simulation – equilibrium and non-equilibrium molecular dynamics
• Statistical mechanics and Thermodynamics of complex fluids – soft condensed matter
• Molecular rheology
• Research Projects, Consultancy and Student Projects
• Computational Study of the Approach to the Brownian limit in Shearing Binary Systems (Australian Research Council Large Grants Scheme, 1998 – 2000)
• Flow of a dilute polymer solution in a slit pore (Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing Expertise Grant July 2001 – June 2002)
• Non-equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations of the rheology of realistic polymer melts (Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing Expertise Grant Jan 2001 – Dec 2001)
• Non-equilibrium Molecular Dynamics Studies of Complex Fluids (Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing Merit Allocation Scheme, 2002 - )
• Transient Time Correlation Function Atomistic Simulations of Polymer Rheology (High Performance Computer and Communications Centre Collaborative Research Project)
• Micro and Nano-structured Polymeric Composites (RMIT Research Investment Fund 2004)
• Molecular Dynamics Study of Stress-Strain Hysteresis in a Nonlinear Viscoelastic Material (Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing Expertise Grant 2002-3)
• Molecular Simulation of the Rheology of Nanocomposite Polymer Materials (Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing e-Research Grant 2005)
• Polymer conformation and compatibility using scattering techniques (Australian Institute of Nuclear Science and Engineering Grant, 2001)
• Molecular Simulation of Polymer Rheology (Senior supervisor of M. Matin, PhD project - completed)
• Temperature and energy distributions in shearing binary systems (Senior supervisor of M. McPhie, PhD project - completed)
• Characteristic lengths of polymer solutions (Senior supervisor of A. Bennett, M App Sc project completed)
• Theoretical analysis of the relaxation towards equilibrium of metastable and unstable states of model fluids (Senior supervisor of K. Coelho, PhD project)
• Microscopic simulation of fluid flow in thin channels (Senior supervisor, T. Kairn, PhD project)
• Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics Simulations of Phase Transitions (Senior Supervisor, A. Charles, M App Sc project)

Awards

• Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, Australian Research Council, 1991
• RMIT Best research proposal award (with Prof. Ian Snook), RMIT University, 1997

Industry / professional / community involvement

• Treasurer, The Australian Society of Rheology

Recent publications (2000 - )

Journal Articles

“The stability of nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations of elongational flows”, B. D. Todd and P. J. Daivis, J. Chem. Phys., 112, 40 (2000).

"Generalized Fourier law for heat flow in a fluid with a strong, nonuniform strain rate", P. J. Daivis and J. L. Khayyam Coelho, Phys. Rev. E, 61, 6003 (2000).

“Comparison of planar shear flow and planar elongational flow for systems of small molecules”, M. L. Matin, P. J. Daivis and B. D. Todd, J. Chem. Phys., 113, 9122 (2000). Erratum: J. Chem. Phys. 115, 5338 (2001).

“Generalized Langevin Equation for nonequilibrium systems”, M. G. McPhie, P. J. Daivis, I. K. Snook, J. Ennis and D. J. Evans, Physica A, 299, 412 (2001).

“The approach to the Brownian limit in particulate dispersions”, I. Snook, B. O’Malley, M. McPhie and P. Daivis, J. Mol. Liq. 103-104C, 405 (2003).

“Cell neighbour list method for planar elongational flow: rheology of a diatomic fluid”, M. L. Matin, P. J. Daivis and B. D. Todd, Computer Physics Communications 151, 35 (2003).

“Nonlinear shear and elongational rheology of polymer melts by non-equilibrium molecular dynamics”, P. J. Daivis, M. L. Matin and B. D. Todd, J. Non-Newtonian Fluid Mech. 111, 1 (2003).

“Steady-state thermodynamics of shearing viscoelastic fluids”, P. J. Daivis and M. L. Matin, J. Chem. Phys. 118, 11111 (2003).

“Concentration dependence of the rheology of short chain polymer solutions”, T. Kairn, P. J. Daivis, M. L. Matin and I. K. Snook, Polymer 45, 2453 (2004).

“Effects of concentration on steady-state viscometric properties of short-chain polymer solutions over the entire concentration range”, T. Kairn, P. J. Daivis, M. L. Matin and I. K. Snook, Int. J. Thermophys. 25, 1075-1084 (2004).

“Measurement of static and dynamic screening lengths of polymers in solution”, A. Bennett, P. J. Daivis R. Shanks and R. Knott, Polymer, 45, 8531-8540 (2004).

“Molecular-dynamics simulation of model polymer nanocomposite rheology and comparison with experiment”, T. Kairn, P. J. Daivis, I. Ivanov and S. Bhattacharya, Accepted for publication in J. Chem. Phys. (2005).

Conferences Papers / Publications

Refereed conference papers:

“Parallelisation of nonequilibrium molecular dynamics code for polymer melts using OpenMP”, Z. Zhou, B. D. Todd and P. J. Daivis, pp275-285, Computational Science - ICCS 2003, Springer-Verlag (Berlin 2003).

“Computer simulation studies of the rheology of soft condensed matter”, P. J. Daivis, I. K. Snook, M. L. Matin, T. Kairn and M. McPhie, 28th Condensed Matter and Materials Meeting of the Australian Institute of Physics, Wagga Wagga (2004) published online at www.aip.org.au/wagga2004/.