Related papers: Stagnation points control chaotic fluctuations in …
The flow of viscoelastic fluids in porous media is encountered in many practical applications, such as in the enhanced oil recovery process or in the groundwater remediation. Once the flow rate exceeds a critical value in such flows, an…
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…
Recent works reveal the importance of chaotic flow fluctuations as a mechanism for the enhanced resistance observed in viscoelastic porous media flows, and also show how chaotic fluctuations are affected by the structural disorder of porous…
Many environmental, energy, and industrial processes involve the flow of polymer solutions in three-dimensional (3D) porous media where fluid is confined to navigate through complex pore space geometries. As polymers are transported through…
In this work, we study the role of viscoelastic instability in the mechanical dispersion of fluid flow through porous media at high Peclet numbers. Using microfluidic experiments and numerical simulations, we show that viscoelastic…
Interfaces moving in a disordered medium exhibit stochastic velocity fluctuations obeying universal scaling relations related to the presence or absence of conservation laws. For fluid invasion of porous media, we show that the fluctuations…
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…
Microscale turbulent flow in porous media is conducive to the development of flow instabilities due to strong vortical and shearing flow occurring within the pore space. When the flow instabilities around individual solid obstacles interact…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
Fluid stretching in porous media governs the mixing of reactants, contaminants, and nutrients, yet how the solid microstructure controls the stretching statistics remains poorly understood. We investigate how porous-medium heterogeneity…
Fluids cooled to the liquid-vapor critical point develop system-spanning fluctuations in density that transform their visual appearance. Despite the rich phenomenology of this critical point, there is not currently an explanation of 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…
Flow through porous media can reshape the medium through erosion and deposition, producing preferential flow channels across a wide range of natural and industrial systems. Yet the mechanisms by which spatial disorder triggers…
The linear stability of a shear-thinning, viscoelastic fluid undergoing any of the canonical rectilinear shear flows, viz., plane Couette flow and pressure-driven flow through a channel or a tube is analyzed in the creeping-flow limit using…
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…
Two-fluid interfaces in porous media, an example of driven disordered systems, were studied by a real time three-dimensional imaging technique with pore scale resolution for a less viscous fluid displacing a more viscous one. With…