Related papers: Micropropulsion and microrheology in complex fluid…
In the study of microscopic flows, self-propulsion has been particularly topical in recent years, with the rise of miniature artificial swimmers as a new tool for flow control, low Reynolds number mixing, micromanipulation or even drug…
Dense suspensions are non-Newtonian fluids which exhibit strong shear thickening and normal stress differences. Using numerical simulation of extensional and shear flows, we investigate how rheological properties are determined by the…
Microrheology is the study of the properties of a complex fluid through the diffusion dynamics of small particles, typically latex beads, moving through that material. Currently, it is the dominant technique in the study of the physical…
Viscoelastic fluids impact the locomotion of swimming microorganisms and can be harnessed to devise new types of self-propelling devices. Here we report on experiments demonstrating the use of normal stress differences for propulsion. Rigid…
We investigate the flow of various non-Newtonian fluids through three-dimensional disordered porous media by direct numerical simulation of momentum transport and continuity equations. Remarkably, our results for power-law (PL) fluids…
Microorganisms are rarely found in Nature swimming freely in an unbounded fluid. Instead, they typically encounter other organisms, hard walls, or deformable boundaries such as free interfaces or membranes. Hydrodynamic interactions between…
Shear flow of dense, non-Brownian suspensions is simulated using the discrete element method, taking particle contact and hydrodynamic lubrication into account. The resulting flow regimes are mapped in the parametric space of solid volume…
Motility is a basic feature of living microorganisms, and how it works is often determined by environmental cues. Recent efforts have focused on develop- ing artificial systems that can mimic microorganisms, and in particular their…
Bulk rheological properties of viscoelastic fluids have been extensively studied in macroscopic shearing geometries. However, little is known when an active microscopic probe is used to locally perturb them far from the linear-response…
An exact similarity solution of the lubrication equations for the steady flow of a viscoelastic Oldroyd-B fluid in a contracting and symmetric hyperbolic channel is derived. The solution is valid for small values of the Deborah number, De…
Diverse chemical, energy, environmental, and industrial processes involve the flow of polymer solutions in porous media. The accumulation and dissipation of elastic stresses as the polymers are transported through the tortuous, confined…
While the rheology of non-Brownian suspensions in the dilute regime is well-understood, their behavior in the dense limit remains mystifying. As the packing fraction of particles increases, particle motion becomes more collective, leading…
In this work, we study non-Newtonian fluid flow in heterogeneous porous media. We are interested in fluids presenting a specific change in rheology: Newtonian below a certain shear rate and power law above. Since porous media generally…
Microfluidic devices manufactured from soft polymeric materials have emerged as a paradigm for cheap, disposable and easy-to-prototype fluidic platforms for integrating chemical and biological assays and analyses. The interplay between the…
The use of continuum mechanics and invariants built from the deviator as an adequate foundation for rheology has been recently disputed by this author. Here we give a specific example of the kind of parcel deformations that are uniquely…
We use a one dimensional symmetric exclusion model to study pressure and osmosis driven flows through molecular-sized channels, such as biological membrane channels and zeolite pores. Analytic expressions are found for the steady-state flow…
Complex fluids subjected to localized microscopic energy inputs, typical of active microrheology setups, exhibit poorly understood nonequilibrium behaviors because of the intricate self-organization of their mesoscopic constituents. In this…
The locomotion of microorganisms in fluids is ubiquitous and plays an important role in numerous biological processes. In this chapter we present an overview of theoretical modeling for low-Reynolds-number locomotion.
Non-Newtonian rheology is widely acknowledged in subsurface fluids, yet its presence and effects are largely ignored in current fracture-flow studies. Here, we simulate fracture flow of non-Newtonian polymer solutions on a several…
Dense suspensions of soft colloidal particles display a broad range of physical and rheological properties which are still far from being fully understood. To elucidate the role of deformability on colloidal flow, we employ computer…