We prove the existence of the global weak entropy solution to the Doi–Saintillan–Shelley model for active and passive rod-like particle suspensions, which couples a Fokker–Planck equation with the incompressible Navier–Stokes or Stokes equation, under the no-flux boundary conditions, L2(Ω;L1(Sd611))L2(Ω;L1(Sd611)) initial data, and finite initial entropy for the particle distribution function in two and three dimensions. Furthermore, for the model with the Stokes equation, we obtain the global L2(Ω×Sd611)L2(Ω×Sd611) weak solution in two and three dimensions and the uniqueness in two dimension.

We investigate systems of self-propelled particles with alignment interaction. Compared to previous work (Degond and Motsch, Math. Models Methods Appl. Sci. 18:1193–1215, 2008a; Frouvelle, Math. Models Methods Appl. Sci., 2012), the force acting on the particles is not normalized, and this modification gives rise to phase transitions from disordered states at low density to aligned states at high densities. This model is the space-inhomogeneous extension of (Frouvelle and Liu, Dynamics in a kinetic model of oriented particles with phase transition, 2012), in which the existence and stability of the equilibrium states were investigated. When the density is lower than a threshold value, the dynamics is described by a nonlinear diffusion equation. By contrast, when the density is larger than this threshold value, the dynamics is described by a similar hydrodynamic model for self-alignment interactions as derived in (Degond and Motsch, Math. Models Methods Appl. Sci. 18:1193–1215, 2008a; Frouvelle, Math. Models Methods Appl. Sci., 2012). However, the modified normalization of the force gives rise to different convection speeds, and the resulting model may lose its hyperbolicity in some regions of the state space.

We consider a system coupling the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations to the Vlasov–Fokker–Planck equation. Such a problem arises in the description of particulate flows. We design a numerical scheme to simulate the behavior of the system. This scheme is asymptotic-preserving, thus efficient in both the kinetic and hydrodynamic regimes. It has a numerical stability condition controlled by the non-stiff convection operator, with an implicit treatment of the stiff drag term and the Fokker–Planck operator. Yet, consistent to a standard asymptotic-preserving Fokker–Planck solver or an incompressible Navier–Stokes solver, only the conjugate–gradient method and fast Poisson and Helmholtz solvers are needed. Numerical experiments are presented to demonstrate the accuracy and asymptotic behavior of the scheme, with several interesting applications.

We studied coupled systems of the Fokker--Planck equation and the Navier--Stokes equation modeling the Hookean and the finitely extensible nonlinear elastic (FENE)-type polymeric flows. We proved the continuous embedding and compact embedding theorems in weighted spaces that naturally arise from related entropy estimates. These embedding estimates are shown to be sharp. For the Hookean polymeric system with a center-of-mass diffusion and a superlinear spring potential, we proved the existence of a global weak solution. Moreover, we were able to tackle the FENE model with $L^2$ initial data for the polymer density instead of the $L^\infty$ counterpart in the literature.

In this paper, we review recent developments on the derivation and properties of macroscopic models of collective motion and self-organization. The starting point is a model of self-propelled particles interacting with its neighbors through alignment. We successively derive a mean-field model and its hydrodynamic limit. The resulting macroscopic model is the Self-Organized Hydrodynamics (SOH). We review the available existence results and known properties of the SOH model and discuss it in view of its possible extensions to other kinds of collective motion.