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Abstract

Complex fluids (colloidal suspensions, emulsions, pasty materials, etc) find application in a variety of industrial branches, some examples of which are food and cosmetic industry. Due to the complexity of these system, analytic solutions are often difficult to work out and one has to resort to numerical methods. Here, I provide a brief survey of computational schemes appropriate to the simulation studies of complex fluids both at equilibrium as well under external perturbations such as a planar shear flow. It is shown how these method may provide interesting information on the relation between the structure of a material and its response to external forces. Furthermore, we discuss how a mesoscopic approach such as the lattice Boltzmann method may be extended to describe the nanoscale phenomena, where thermal fluctuations cannot be neglected.