Brian J. Edwards

University of Tennessee in Knoxville

Chemical Engineer

Fellow, Elected 2024

Brian Edwards is a professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He received a B.S. degree in chemical engineering from the University of Illinois in 1986, and a Ph.D. degree in chemical engineering from the University of Delaware in 1991 under the direction of Prof. Antony Beris. He studied under Prof. Anthony McHugh at the University of Illinois and Prof. Hans Christian Öttinger at ETH-Zürich during the 1990s as a postdoctoral researcher before joining UTK in 2001.

Throughout his career, Edwards has been fascinated by the theory and application of nonequilibrium thermodynamics to the rheology and fluid mechanics of complex fluids. His early work with Beris focused on deriving and formalizing a Hamiltonian-based description of the underlying mathematical and thermodynamic structure of flow and transport phenomena, culminating in the monograph Thermodynamics of Flowing Systems, coauthored with Beris and published by Oxford University Press in 1994. As a result of this work, Edwards and Beris derived the first complete tensorial model of liquid crystal (LC) dynamics incorporating all the physical coupled transport processes known to occur in these complicated materials, including Frank distortion energy, Landau free energy, nematic and cholesteric distributional ordering, thereby extending and unifying other LC theories, including the Leslie-Ericksen and Doi models. The resulting model, commonly referred to as the “Beris-Edwards model,” has been used as the basis for the majority of LC dynamics theoretical studies over the past 20 years.

Edwards has also been involved in the development and application of atomistic simulation to flows of polymer melts and solutions using advanced supercomputing facilities. His work has revealed important new insights into the individual molecular dynamics of concentrated solutions and melts in shear and elongational flow fields, especially as related to flow-induced disentanglement effects, such as molecular rotation in entangled polymeric liquids under shear, as well as flow-induced phase separation into bicontinuous fluid phases of configurationally segregated molecules and subsequent flow-induced crystallization.