(220a) Slip Slidin' Away: Three Decades of Adventures in Computational Rheology and Lubrication

Carol Hall has been a defining influence on the lives and careers of many of us. As an academic younger brother (Carol received her PhD under the direction of George Stell, with whom Cummings would later perform postdoctoral research), Cummings has enjoyed career-long benefit of Carolâ??s advice and unwavering support. As a young assistant professor new to the discipline that Carol helped him to enter, Cummings sought Carolâ??s advice about where to make a unique impact in chemical engineering. Transport properties was one of the areas that came to the forefront of these discussions, and so began â?? with the first paper published in 1986 â?? a three decades long focus on applying non-equilibrium molecular simulation to the prediction and understanding of transport properties in systems ranging from the simple to the complex. We will briefly review some of the highlights of this work, concluding with our recent work exploring the hypothesized hydration lubrication mechanism in knee joints that purports to explain extremely low friction coefficients in a biosystem subject to very high normal pressures.