Related papers: Flow instabilities in complex fluids: Nonlinear rh…
We study the stability of two-fluid flow through a plane channel at Reynolds numbers of a hundred to a thousand in the linear and nonlinear regimes. The two fluids have the same density but different viscosities. The fluids, when miscible,…
Active nematics exhibit spontaneous flows through a well-known linear instability of the uniformly-aligned quiescent state. Here we show that even a linearly stable uniform state can experience a nonlinear instability, resulting in a…
Solutions of long, flexible polymer molecules are complex fluids that simultaneously exhibit fluid-like and solid-like behaviour. When subjected to external flows, dilute polymer solutions develop elastic turbulence - a unique chaotic flow…
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 use a continuum, two-fluid approach to study a mixture of two active nematic fluids. Even in the absence of thermodynamically-driven ordering, for mixtures of different activities we observe turbulent microphase separation, where domains…
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…
When subjected to sufficiently strong velocity gradients, solutions of long, flexible polymers exhibit flow instabilities and chaotic motion, often referred to as elastic turbulence. Its mechanism differs from the familiar, inertia-driven…
This paper is on the effect of nonlinearity in the equations for propagation of disturbances on transition in the class of Spiral Poiseuille Flows. The problem is approached from the fundamental point of view of following the growth of…
Volatile viscous fluids on partially-wetting solid substrates can exhibit interesting interfacial instabilities and pattern formation. We study the dynamics of vapor condensation and fluid evaporation governed by a one-sided model in a low…
In the limit of infinite yield time for stresses, the hydrodynamic equations for viscoelastic, Non-Newtonian liquids such as polymer melts must reduce to that for solids. This piece of information suffices to uniquely determine the…
Networks and dense suspensions frequently reside near a boundary between soft (or fluid-like) and rigid (or solid-like) regimes. Transitions between these regimes can be driven by changes in structure, density, or applied stress or strain.…
This paper addresses the stability of plane Couette flow in the presence of strong density and viscosity stratifications. It demonstrates the existence of a generalised inflection point that satisfies the generalised Fjortoft's criterion of…
We review three different types of viscoelastic surface instabilities: The Rayleigh -- Plateau, the Saffman -- Taylor and the Faraday instability. These instabilities are classical examples of hydrodynamic surface instabilities. The…
We describe a simple classroom demonstration of a fluid-dynamic instability. The demonstration requires only a bucket of water, a piece of string and some used tealeaves or coffee grounds. We argue that the mechanism for the instability, at…
There is a clear distinction between simple laminar and complex turbulent fluids. But in some cases, as for the nocturnal planetary boundary layer, a stable and well-ordered flow can develop intense and sporadic bursts of turbulent activity…
We elucidate a qualitative difference in rheology between fragile and network-forming strong liquids. In a flow field, the structural configuration is distorted in accordance with the flow symmetry, whereas the form of the interaction…
We describe a mechanism that results in the nonlinear instability of stationary states even in the case where the stationary states are linearly stable. This instability is due to the nonlinearity-induced coupling of the linearization's…
We study two-fluid systems with nonzero fluid velocities and compute their sound modes, which indicate various instabilities. For the case of two zero-temperature superfluids we employ a microscopic field-theoretical model of two coupled…
Equilibrium, traveling wave, and periodic orbit solutions of pipe, channel, and plane Couette flows can now be computed precisely at Reynolds numbers above the onset of turbulence. These invariant solutions capture the complex dynamics of…
The non-stretching approximation of polymer rheology simplifies a constitutive equation but fundamentally changes its behavior in fast flows, and the circumstances under which fast flows emerge cannot always be predicted a-priori. In this…