Related papers: A Viscoelastic Catastrophe
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…
Viscoelastic flows through microscale porous arrays exhibit complex path-selection and switching phenomena. However, understanding this process is limited by a lack of studies linking between a single object and large arrays. Here, we…
In this paper, we discuss whether the instability of viscoelastic flow around a circular cylinder is subcritical or supercritical by numerical simulation. The Oldroyd-B model is selected to describe the viscoelastic constitutive…
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…
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…
Viscoelastic flows transition from steady to time-dependent, chaotic dynamics under critical flow conditions, but the implications of geometric disorder for flow stability in these systems are unknown. Utilizing microfluidics, we flow a…
The conformation of a long linear polymer dissolved in fluid and exposed to an extensional flow is well-known to exhibit a "coil-stretch" transition, which for sufficiently long chains can lead to bistability. The present work reports…
Plane Couette flow of visco-elastic fluids is shown to exhibit a purely elastic subcritical instability in spite of being linearly stable. The mechanism of this instability is proposed and the nonlinear stability analysis of plane Couette…
The lid-driven cavity flow is a well-known benchmark problem for the validation of new numerical methods and techniques. In experimental and numerical studies with viscoelastic fluids in such lid-driven flows, purely-elastic instabilities…
Viscoelastic fluids exhibit elastic instabilities in simple shear flow and flow through curved streamlines. Surprisingly, we found in a porous medium such fluids show strikingly different hydrodynamic instabilities depicted by very large…
We experimentally investigate the flow of a viscoelastic fluid in a parallel shear geometry at low Reynolds number. As the flow becomes unstable via a nonlinear subcritical instability, velocimetry measurements show non-periodic…
A re-investigation of the gravothermal catastrophe is presented. By means of a linear perturbation analysis, we study the dynamical stability of a spherical self-gravitating isothermal fluid of finite volume and find that the conditions for…
In this work, we report numerical results on the flow instability and bifurcation of a viscoelastic fluid in the upstream region of a confined cylinder in a narrow channel. Two-dimensional direct numerical simulations based on the FENE-P…
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…
We present experimental evidence of global viscoelastic flow transitions in 2:1, 8:1 and 32:1 planar contractions under inertia-less conditions. Light sheet visualization and laser Doppler velocimetry techniques are used to probe spatial…
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…
Recently, detailed experiments on visco-elastic channel flow have provided convincing evidence for a nonlinear instability scenario which we had argued for based on calculations for visco-elastic Couette flow. Motivated by these experiments…
The flow of viscoelastic fluids in channels and pipes remain poorly understood, particularly at low Reynolds numbers. Here, we investigate the flow of polymeric solutions in straight channels using pressure measurements and particle…
It is shown that a channel flow of a dilute polymer solution between two widely spaced cylinders hindering the flow is an important paradigm of an unbounded flow in the case in which the channel wall is located sufficiently far from the…
In this paper we report a novel inertial instability that occurs in electro-osmotically driven channel flows. We assume that the charge motion under the influence of an externally applied electric field is confined to a small vicinity of…