Related papers: Elastic Rayleigh-Plateau instability: Dynamical se…
Diverse equilibrium systems with heterogeneous interactions lie at the edge of stability. Such marginally stable states are dynamically selected as the most abundant ones or as those with the largest basins of attraction. On the other hand,…
On microscopic scales, the crystallinity of flexible tethered or cross linked membranes determines their mechanical response. We show that by controlling the type, number and distribution of defects on a spherical elastic shell, it is…
Using a combination of theory, experiments, and numerical simulations, we investigate the stability of coherent structures in a suspension of strongly aligned active swimmers. We show that a dilute jet of pullers undergoes a pearling…
Addition of particles to a viscoelastic suspension dramatically alters the properties of the mixture, particularly when it is sheared or otherwise processed. Shear-induced stretching of the polymers results in elastic stress that causes a…
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 investigate the miscible Rayleigh-Taylor (RT) instability in both 2 and 3 dimensions using direct numerical simulations, where the working fluid is assumed incompressible under the Boussinesq approximation. We first consider the case of…
A new category of front propagation problems is proposed in which a spreading instability evolves through a singular configuration before saturating. We examine the nature of this front for the viscous Rayleigh instability of a column of…
Liquid crystal elastomers are cross-linked elastomer networks with liquid crystal mesogens incorporated into the main or side chain. Polydomain liquid crystalline (nematic) elastomers exhibit unusual mechanical properties like soft…
Widespread processes in nature and technology are governed by the dynamical transition whereby a material in an initially solid-like state then yields plastically. Major unresolved questions concern whether any material will yield smoothly…
It is well known that the Poiseuille flow of a visco-elastic polymer fluid between plates or through a tube is linearly stable in the zero Reynolds number limit, although the stability is weak for large Weissenberg numbers. In this paper we…
Cavitation and sulcification of soft elastomers are two examples of thresholdless, nonlinear instabilities that evade detection by linearization. I show that the onset of such instabilities can be understood as a kind of phase coexistence…
We perform a linear stability analysis of viscoelastic plane Couette and plane Poiseuille flows with free-slip boundary conditions. The fluid is described by the Oldroyd-B constitutive model, and the flows are driven by a suitable body…
We study flow driven through a finite-length planar rigid channel by a fixed upstream flux, where a segment of one wall is replaced by a pre-stressed elastic beam subject to uniform external pressure. The steady and unsteady systems are…
We analyze the instability of a vortex column in a dilute polymer solution at large $\textit{Re}$ and $\textit{De}$ with $\textit{El} = \textit{De}/\textit{Re}$, the elasticity number, being finite. Here, $\textit{Re} = \Omega_0 a^2/\nu_s$…
Surface roughness emerges naturally during mechanical removal of material, fracture, chemical deposition, plastic deformation, indentation, and other processes. Here, we use continuum simulations to show how roughness which is neither…
A thin flat rectangular plate supported on its edges and subjected to in-plane loading exhibits stable post-buckling behaviour. However, the introduction of a nonlinear (softening) elastic foundation may cause the response to become…
The pinning of an inhomogeneous elastic medium by a disordered substrate is studied analytically and numerically. The static and dynamic properties of a $D$-dimensional system are shown to be equivalent to those of the well known problem of…
In the past fifteen years, flow instabilities reminiscent of the Taylor-like instabilities driven by hoop stresses, have been observed in wormlike micelles based on surfactant molecules. In particular, purely elastic instabilities and…
We study what is clearly one of the most common modes of deformation found in nature, science and engineering, namely the large elastic bending of curved structures, as well as its inverse, unbending, which can be brought beyond complete…
We consider the free boundary problem for two layers of immiscible, viscous, incompressible fluid in a uniform gravitational field, lying above a rigid bottom in a three-dimensional horizontally periodic setting. The effect of surface…