The research training group addresses scientific questions arising in friction, materials aging, material design and biological function, which so far cannot be approached by single computational methods or standard multiscale approaches.

In Project P1 we study adhesion and friction involving fluids or viscous matter, such as encountered in adhesives or in lubrication. In these systems, molecular interactions determine the viscoelastic response of the confined adhesive or lubricant, but the entrainment conditions are determined by long-range elastic deformation. The goal of this project is to recursively couple mesoscale calculations to molecular dynamics models of the adhesive or lubricant, thereby bypassing the need for explicit constitutive equations that are presently used for these types of problems.