Related papers: Viscoelastic and elastomeric active matter: Linear…
A paradigm for internally driven matter is the active nematic liquid crystal, whereby the equations of a conventional nematic are supplemented by a minimal active stress that violates time reversal symmetry. In practice, active fluids may…
We use linear stability analysis and hybrid lattice Boltzmann simulations to study the dynamical behaviour of an active nematic confined in a channel made of viscoelastic material. We find that the quiescent, ordered active nematic is…
Models of active nematics in biological systems normally require complexity arising from the hydrodynamics involved at the microscopic level as well as the viscoelastic nature of the system. Here we show that a minimal, space-independent,…
Most, but not all, liquid crystals tend to align when subject to shear flow, while most nematic polymeric liquid crystals undergo a tumbling instability, where the director rotate with the flow. The reasons of this instability remain…
Elastic turbulence is a chaotic flow state observed in dilute polymer solutions in the absence of inertia. It was discovered experimentally in circular geometries and has long been thought to require a finite amplitude perturbation in…
Continuum models of active nematic gels have proved successful to describe a number of biological systems consisting of a population of rodlike motile subunits in a fluid environment. However, in order to get a thorough understanding of the…
I put forward a continuum theory for active nematic gels, defined as fluids or suspensions of orientable rodlike objects endowed with active dynamics, that is based on symmetry arguments and compatibility with thermodynamics. The starting…
The hydrodynamics of viscoelastic materials (for example polymer melts and solutions) presents interesting and complex phenomena, for example instabilities and turbulent flow at very low Reynolds numbers due to normal stress effects and the…
We introduce a class of continuum mechanical models aimed at describing the behaviour of viscoelastic fluids by incorporating concepts originated in the theory of solid plasticity. Within this class, even a simple model with constant…
Active matter systems such as eukaryotic cells and bacteria continuously transform chemical energy to motion. Hence living systems exert active stresses on the complex environments in which they reside. One recurring aspect of this…
Stability is an important and fruitful avenue of research for liquid crystal elastomers. At constant temperature, upon stretching, the homogeneous state of a nematic body becomes unstable, and alternating shear stripes develop at very low…
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…
Elastic turbulence is a spatially and temporally disordered flow state appearing in viscoelastic fluids at vanishing fluid inertia and large elasticity. The resulting flows have broad technological interest, particularly to enhance mixing…
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…
The translation and shape deformations of a passive viscous Newtonian droplet immersed in an active nematic liquid crystal under circular confinement are analyzed using a linear stability analysis. We focus on the case of a sharply aligned…
We report experimental results on elastic instability in a viscoelastic channel shear flow due to only a natural non-smoothed inlet and small holes along the channel for pressure measurements. We show that non-normal mode instability…
Motivated by the observation of highly unstable flowing states in suspensions of microtubules and kinesin, we analyze a model of mutually-propelled filaments suspended in a solvent. The system undergoes a mean-field isotropic-nematic…
Liquid crystal elastomers are cross-linked polymer networks covalently bonded with liquid crystal mesogens. In the nematic phase, due to strong coupling between mechanical strain and orientational order, these materials display…
Viscoelastic fluids are a common subclass of rheologically complex materials that are encountered in diverse fields from biology to polymer processing. Often the flows of viscoelastic fluids are unstable in situations where ordinary…
In active nematic liquid crystals activity is able to drive chaotic spatiotemporal flows referred to as active turbulence. Active turbulence has been characterized through theoretical and experimental work as a low Reynolds number…