Related papers: Chaotic flow and efficient mixing in a micro-chann…
Chaotic micromixers such as the staggered herringbone mixer developed by Stroock et al. allow efficient mixing of fluids even at low Reynolds number by repeated stretching and folding of the fluid interfaces. The ability of the fluid to mix…
Elastic turbulence is a chaotic flow state observed in dilute polymer solutions in the absence of inertia. It was discovered experimentally in circular geometries and has long been thought to require a finite amplitude perturbation in…
The relationship between the polymer orientation and the chaotic flow, in a dilute solution of rigid rodlike polymers at low Reynolds number, is investigated by means of direct numerical simulations. It is found that the rods tend to align…
We address the evaluation of mixing efficiency in experiments of chaotic mixing inside an open-flow channel. Since the open flow continuously brings new fluid into the limited mixing region, it is difficult to define relevant mixing…
The addition of minute amounts of chemically inert polyacrylamide polymer to liquids results in large instabilities under steady electro-osmotic pumping through 2:1 constrictions, demonstrating that laminar flow conditions can be broken in…
We propose a novel strategy for designing chaotic micromixers using curved channels confined between two flat planes. The location of the separatrix between the Dean vortices, induced by centrifugal force, is dependent on the location of…
We investigate the enhancement of both mixing and heat transfer in a two-rod mixer for highly-viscous non-Newtonian fluids. The mixer is composed of two vertical, circular rods in a cylindrical tank. Chaotic flows are obtained by imposing…
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…
We combine a DEM simulation with a stochastic process to model the movement of spherical particles in a turbulent channel flow. With this model we investigate the mixing properties of two species of particles flowing through the channel. We…
The sedimentation of a pair of rigid circular particles in a two-dimensional vertical channel containing a Newtonian fluid is investigated numerically, for terminal particle Reynolds numbers ranging from 1 to 10, and for a confinement ratio…
The flow past inline oscillating rectangular cylinders is studied numerically at a Reynolds number representative of two-dimensional flow. A symmetric mode, known as S-II, consisting of a pair of oppositely-signed vortices on each side,…
Shear flow is known to induce huge density fluctuations in otherwise clear and uniform polymer solutions. This effect is rooted in the elasticity of the entangled polymer network, and can span distances over a thousand chains wide. It has…
When a medium composed of microscopic elements is subjected to a high intensity field, the individual behaviors of microscopic elements can become chaotic. In such cases it is important to consider the effects of this irregularity at…
Polymer solutions can develop chaotic flows, even at low inertia. This purely elastic turbulence is well studied, but little is known about the transition to chaos. In 2D channel flow and parallel shear flow, traveling wave solutions…
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)…
We study the laminar and turbulent channel flow over a viscous hyper-elastic wall and show that it is possible to sustain an unsteady chaotic turbulent-like flow at any Reynolds number by properly choosing the wall elastic modulus. We…
We consider laminar flow in channels constrained geometrically to remain between two parallel planes; this geometry is typical of microchannels obtained with a single step by current microfabrication techniques. For pressure-driven Stokes…
Solutions of long, flexible polymer molecules are complex fluids that simultaneously exhibit fluid-like and solid-like behaviour. When subjected to an external flow, dilute polymer solutions exhibit elastic turbulence - a unique, chaotic…
Topological chaos has emerged as a powerful tool to investigate fluid mixing. While this theory can guarantee a lower bound on the stretching rate of certain material lines, it does not indicate what fraction of the fluid actually…
We show that viscoelastic plane Poiseuille flow becomes linearly unstable in the absence of inertia, in the limit of high elasticities, for ultra-dilute polymer solutions. While inertialess elastic instabilities have been predicted for…