Related papers: Statistics of Polymer Extension in a Random Flow w…
On the basis of the thermodynamic theory of the excluded volume effects, we show that the size exponent varies abruptly, depending on the change of the segment concentration. For linear polymers, the exponent changes discontinuously from…
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…
The tumbling of a rigid rod in a shear flow is analyzed in the high viscosity limit. Following Burgers, the Master Equation is derived for the probability distribution of the orientation of the rod. The equation contains one dimensionless…
Beneitez et al. (Phys. Rev. Fluids, 8, L101901, 2023) have recently discovered a new linear "polymer diffusive instability" (PDI) in inertialess rectilinear viscoelastic shear flow using the FENE-P model when polymer stress diffusion is…
Polymers in shear flow are ubiquitous and we study their motion in a viscoelastic fluid under shear. Employing dumbbells as representative, we find that the center of mass motion follows: $\langle x^2_c(t) \rangle \sim \dot{\gamma}^2…
Molecular dynamics simulations confirm recent extensional flow experiments showing ring polymer melts exhibit strong extension-rate thickening of the viscosity at Weissenberg numbers $Wi<<1$. Thickening coincides with the extreme elongation…
Bead spring models for polymers in solution are nonlinear if either the finite extensibility of the polymer, excluded volume effects or hydrodynamic interactions between polymer segments are taken into account. For such models we use a…
The dynamics of polymer decompression, i.e., a process from compressed, compact state to the relaxed swoll en conformation, can be formally described as a {\it nonlinear diffusion}. We discuss here two basic examples: (i) the expansion, or…
We investigate theoretically the near-wall region in elastic turbulence of a dilute polymer solution in the limit of large Weissenberg number. As it was established experimentally, elastic turbulence possesses a boundary layer where the…
The phenomenon of tumbling of microscopic objects is commonly associated with shear flows. We address the question of whether tumbling can also occur in stretching-dominated flows. To answer this, we study the dynamics of a semi-flexible…
We investigate spatio-temporal structures in sheared polymer systems by solving a time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau model in two dimensions. (i) In polymer solutions above the coexistence curve, crossover from linear to nonlinear regimes…
The effect of shear flows on the thermal conductivity of polymer melts is investigated using a reversed nonequilibrium molecular dynamics (RNEMD) method. We extended the original RNEMD method to simultaneously produce spatial gradients of…
Diffusion properties of a self-avoiding polymer embedded in regularly distributed obstacles with spacing a=20 and confined in two dimensions is studied numerically using the extended bond fluctuation method which we have developed recently.…
Viscoelastic shear flows support additional chaotic states beyond simple Newtonian turbulence. In vanishing Reynolds number flows, the nonlinearity in the polymer evolution equation alone can sustain inertialess 'elastic' turbulence (ET)…
The interaction of polymers with turbulent shear flows is examined. We focus on the structure of the elastic stress tensor, which is proportional to the polymer conformation tensor. We examine this object in turbulent flows of increasing…
As a streak of dye is advected by a chaotic flow, it stretches and folds and becomes indistinguishable from a one-dimensional idealized material line. The variation along a material line of the total stretching experienced by fluid elements…
We use mesoscale simulations to gain insight into the digestion of biopolymers by studying the break-up dynamics of polymer aggregates (boluses) bound by physical cross-links. We investigate aggregate evolution, establishing that the…
We present numerical studies of stretching of Hookean dumbbells in a turbulent Navier-Stokes flow with a linear mean profile, <u_x>=Sy. In addition to the turbulence features beyond the viscous Kolmogorov scale \eta, the dynamics at the…
We investigate a variety of different polymer solutions in shear and elongational flow. The shear flow is created in the cone-plate-geometry of a commercial rheometer. We use capillary thinning of a filament that is formed by a polymer…
An experimental investigation of the viscosity overshoot phenomenon observed during uniaxial extension of a low density polyethylene is pre- sented. For this purpose, traditional integral viscosity measurements on a Muenstedt type…