Related papers: Extensional Instability in Electro-Osmotic Microfl…
The addition of minute amounts of chemically inert polyacrylamide polymer to liquids results in large instabilities under steady electro-osmotic pumping through 2:1 constrictions, demonstrating that laminar flow conditions can be broken in…
Polymers in nonuniform flows undergo strong deformation, which in the presence of persistent stretching can result in the coil-stretch transition. This phenomenon has been characterized by using the formalism of nonequilibrium statistical…
Polymer solutions are often injected in porous media for applications such as oil recovery and groundwater remediation. As the fluid navigates the tortuous pore space, elastic stresses build up, causing the flow to become unstable at…
Polymer solutions exhibit anomalous flow thickening -- marked by an abrupt increase in the macroscopic flow resistance -- above a threshold flow rate in a porous medium, but not in bulk solution. This phenomenon has evaded a mechanistic…
We investigate turbulence in dilute polymer solutions when polymers are strongly stretched by the flow. We establish power-law spectrum of velocity, which is not associated with a flux of a conserved quantity, in two cases. The first case…
Diverse processes rely on the viscous flow of polymer solutions through porous media. In many cases, the macroscopic flow resistance abruptly increases above a threshold flow rate in a porous medium---but not in bulk solution. The reason…
Turbulence is one of the most fascinating phenomena in nature and one of the biggest challenges for modern physics. It is common knowledge that a flow of a simple, Newtonian fluid is likely to be turbulent, when velocity is high, viscosity…
We study experimentally the interfacial instability between a layer of dilute polymer solution and water flowing in a thin capillary. The use of microfluidic devices allows us to observe and quantify in great detail the features of the…
Interior stagnation point flows of viscoelastic liquids arise in a wide variety of applications including extensional viscometry, polymer processing and microfluidics. Experimentally, these flows have long been known to exhibit…
It is presently believed that flows of viscoelastic polymer solutions in geometries such as a straight pipe or channel are linearly stable. Here we present experimental evidence that such flows can be nonlinearly unstable and can exhibit a…
We report evidence of irregular unsteady flow of two-dimensional polymer solutions in the absence of inertia in cross-slot geometry using numerical simulations of Oldroyd-B model. By exploring the transition to time-dependent flow versus…
Turbulent flows have been used for millennia to mix solutes; a familiar example is stirring cream into coffee. However, many energy, environmental, and industrial processes rely on the mixing of solutes in porous media where confinement…
We show that viscoelastic plane Poiseuille flow becomes linearly unstable in the absence of inertia, in the limit of high elasticities, for ultra-dilute polymer solutions. While inertialess elastic instabilities have been predicted for…
Microscopic flows are almost universally linear, laminar and stationary because Reynolds number, $Re$, is usually very small. That impedes mixing in micro-fluidic devices, which sometimes limits their performance. Here we show that truly…
It is shown that the addition of small amounts of microscopic rods in a viscous fluid at low Reynolds number causes a significant increase of the flow resistance. Numerical simulations of the dynamics of the solution reveal that this…
We investigate the effect of flow kinematics on the extensional viscosity of dilute polymer solutions by conducting dissipative particle dynamics simulations under uniaxial, planar, and biaxial extensional flows. At high extension rates,…
Solutions of long, flexible polymer molecules are complex fluids that simultaneously exhibit fluid-like and solid-like behaviour. When subjected to an external flow, dilute polymer solutions exhibit elastic turbulence - a unique, chaotic…
We demonstrate the existence of a fluid-structure instability arising from the interaction of electro-osmotic flow with an elastic substrate. Considering the case of flow within a soft fluidic chamber, we show that above a certain electric…
Behavior of a dilute polymer solution in a random three-dimensional flow with an average shear is studied experimentally. Polymer contribution to the shear stress is found to be more than two orders of magnitude higher than in a laminar…
When injected through a contraction, high molecular weight polymer solutions exhibit a sharp increase of apparent viscosity which originates from stretching polymer chains above a critical extension rate. This chain stretching can also…