Sreenath Krishnan B.Tech., Mechanical Engineering Indian Institue of Technology, Madras, 2011 Email: ksree@stanford.edu

During the drilling of oil and gas wells, solid suspensions in polymeric solutions are pumped to help prop open the fracture. The motion of the solid particles in the pipe system leading to the fracture is largely unknown, but important. I am primarily concerned with solid particles dispersed in a viscoelastic fluid in channels of millimeter width and examine the flow behavior of in the vicinity of bifurcations of one channel to two. The goal is to have a develop a solver for channel flows containing one or more spherical particles in the T-geometry.