Tumbling of a Brownian particle in an extensional flow
Fluid Dynamics
2016-10-07 v2 Chaotic Dynamics
Abstract
The phenomenon of tumbling of microscopic objects is commonly associated with shear flows. We address the question of whether tumbling can also occur in stretching-dominated flows. To answer this, we study the dynamics of a semi-flexible trumbbell in a planar extensional velocity field. We show that the trumbbell undergoes a random tumbling-through-folding motion. The probability distribution of long tumbling times is exponential with a time scale exponentially increasing with the Weissenberg number.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1609.06453,
title = {Tumbling of a Brownian particle in an extensional flow},
author = {Emmanuel Lance Christopher VI Medillo Plan and Dario Vincenzi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.06453},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
11 pages, 8 figures, to be published in Proc. R. Soc. A