David C. Venerus

New Jersey Institute of Technology

Chemical Engineer

Fellow, Elected 2021

David C. Venerus is a professor in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering and Director of the Materials Engineering Program at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) in Newark. Professor Venerus received his B.S. degree in chemical engineering from the University of Rhode Island in 1984, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in chemical engineering from Penn State University in 1986 and 1989, respectively. Prior to coming to NJIT in 2018, he was on the faculty in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago from 1989. He also has several times been a visiting professor in the Department of Materials at the ETH Zürich and in the Institute for Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago.

Early in his career, Professor Venerus established himself as a leader in experimental rheology and its use in evaluating rheological constitutive models and theories for entangled polymer liquids. These include the tube model, the pom-pom model, and more recently the slip-link model developed by Jay Schieber (IIT). His experimental work on polymer liquids also includes the application of rheo-optical methods to examine the validity of the stress-optic rule in elongational flows, quantitative velocity and stress field measurements in two-dimensional flows, and investigations on shear banding. Professor Venerus has pioneered the development of a novel experimental method for the study of complex fluids in equibiaxial elongational deformations known as continuous lubricated squeezing flow (CLSF). Presently, this is the only technique for conducting such experiments, and Professor Venerus’ lab has used CLSF to obtain previously unavailable data for several polymer melts that lay the foundation for structure-property relations for this important flow. For more than 20 years, Professor Venerus in collaboration with Jay Schieber have investigated the effects of flow on thermal transport in complex fluids. This work involved the development of a novel optical technique based on Forced Rayleigh Scattering capable of measuring (time-dependent) components of the thermal conductivity tensor in deforming polymers. This original research has resulted in unique results showing the connection between flow-induced polymer chain orientation and anisotropic thermal conductivity in both shear and elongational flows of polymer melts and cross-linked elastomers. Moreover, these unique data have established the validity of the theoretically predicted stress-thermal rule, which is analogous to the well-known stress-optic rule. More recently, Professor Venerus is interested in the theory of interfacial transport phenomena and its applications.

Professor Venerus has been an active member of The Society of Rheology serving on the Nominating and Bingham Medal Committees, and several times being session chair and symposia organizer for the Society’s Annual Meeting. He also serves on the Editorial Boards of Applied Rheology and Scientific Reports. Professor Venerus co-authored with H.C. Öttinger (ETH, 2008 Bingham Medalist) the textbook "A Modern Course in Transport Phenomena" (Cambridge U. Press, 2018).