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 addition of a small amount of polymers to pure water can alter its flow behavior drastically and the type of instability may change not only quantitatively but also qualitatively. We will show that some of the observed new phenomena can be explained by the use of simple rheological models that contain most of the underlying physical mechanisms leading to the instability. A quantitative description however is often only possible close to the onset of the instability or for weak deviations from Newtonian behavior. A complete theoretical description is still lacking when the system is driven far from equilibrium or for fluids with strong non-Newtonian behavior.
In this fluid dynamics video prepared for the APS-DFD Gallery of Fluid Motion we study the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability for both Newtonian and viscoelastic jets. The nonlinear dynamics of the jet motion are slowed down by orders of magnitude using a synchronized strobe effect coupled with precise timing control of perturbation frequencies. Our results show that at high wave-numbers the imposed perturbations initially grow linearly with time and the jet axis remains straight while the Kelvin-Helmholtz wave amplitude grows and rolls up into bags that encapsulate the central jet within themselves…
Viscoelastic flow through an abrupt planar contraction geometry above a certain Weissenberg number (Wi) is well known to become unstable upstream of the contraction plane via a central jet separating from the walls and forming vortices in the salient corners. Here, for the first time we consider three-dimensional (3D) viscoelastic contraction flows in a microfabricated glass square-square contraction geometry. We employ state-of-the-art microtomographic particle image velocimetry to produce time-resolved and volumetric quantification of the 3D viscoelastic instabilities arising in a dilute pol…
The Oldroyd-B model has been used extensively to predict a host of instabilities in shearing flows of viscoelastic fluids, often realized experimentally using polymer solutions. The present review, written on the occasion of the birth centenary of James Oldroyd, provides an overview of instabilities found across major classes of shearing flows. These comprise (i) the canonical rectilinear shearing flows including plane Couette, plane and pipe Poiseuille flows; (ii) viscometric shearing flows with curved streamlines such as those in the Taylor-Couette, cone-and-plate and parallel-plate geometri…
Microbubble surface instabilities in a strain stiffening viscoelastic material
School of Engineering, Brown University（布朗大学工程学院）；Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Michigan（密歇根大学机械工程系）；Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Michigan（密歇根大学生物医学工程系）；Department of Biomedical Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校生物医学工程系）；Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校航空航天工程与力学系）；Texas Materials Institute, The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校德州材料研究所）
The lid-driven cavity flow is a well-known benchmark problem for the validation of new numerical methods and techniques. In experimental and numerical studies with viscoelastic fluids in such lid-driven flows, purely-elastic instabilities have been shown to appear even at very low Reynolds numbers. A finite-volume viscoelastic code, using the log-conformation formulation, is used in this work to probe the effect of viscoelasticity on the appearance of such instabilities in two-dimensional lid-driven cavities for a wide range of aspect ratios (0.125 < height/length < 4.0), at different Deborah …
The formation and destabilisation of viscoelastic filaments are of importance in many industrial and biological processes. Filament instabilities have been observed for viscoelastic fluids but recently also for soft elastic solids. In this work, we address the central question how to connect the dynamical behavior of viscoelastic liquids to that of soft elastic solids. We take advantage of a biopolymer material whose viscoelastic properties can be tuned over a very large range by its pH, and study the destabilization and ensuing instabilities in uniaxial extensional deformation. In agreement w…
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 Newtonian fluids are stable, owing to the nonlinear coupling of the elastic and viscous stresses. Perhaps more surprisingly, the instabilities produce flows with the hallmarks of turbulence -- even though the effective Reynolds numbers may be $O(1)$ or smaller. We provide perspectives on viscoelastic flow instabilities by integrating the input from speakers at a re…
The viscoelastic fluids are usually the blends of a polymeric solute and a Newtonian solvent. In the presence of a temperature gradient, stratification of these solutes can take place via the Soret effect. Here, we investigate the classical Marangoni instability problem for a thin viscoelastic film considering this binary aspect of the fluid. The film, bounded above by a deformable free surface, is subjected to heating from below by a solid substrate. Linear stability analysis performed numerically for perturbations of finite wavelength (short-wave perturbations) reveals that both monotonic an…
Dilute polymer solutions are known to exhibit purely elastic instabilities even when the fluid inertia is negligible. Here we report the quantitative evidence of two consecutive oscillatory elastic instabilities in an elongation flow of a dilute polymer solution as realized in a T-junction geometry with a long recirculating cavity. The main result reported here is the observation and characterization of the first transition as a forward Hopf bifurcation resulted in a uniformly oscillating state due to breaking of time translational invariance. This unexpected finding is in contrast with previo…
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 instabilities, but the mechanisms underlying them have not previously been elucidated. We computationally demonstrate the existence of a supercritical oscillatory instability of low-Reynolds number viscoelastic flow in a two-dimensional cross-slot geometry. The fluctuations are closely associated with the "birefringent strand" of highly stretched polymer chains associat…
Viscoelastic surface rheology plays an important role in multiphase systems. A typical example is the actin cortex which surrounds most animal cells. It shows elastic properties for short time scales and behaves viscous for longer time scales. Hence, realistic simulations of cell shape dynamics require a model capturing the entire elastic to viscous spectrum. However, currently there are no numerical methods to simulate deforming viscoelastic surfaces. Thus models for the cell cortex, or other viscoelastic surfaces, are usually based on assumptions or simplifications which limit their applicab…
This work presents a study of the interfacial dynamics of thin viscoelastic films subjected to the gravitational force and substrate interactions induced by the disjoining pressure, in two spatial dimensions. The governing equation is derived as a long-wave approximation of the Navier-Stokes equations for incompressible viscoelastic liquids under the effect of gravity, with the Jeffreys model for viscoelastic stresses. For the particular cases of horizontal or inverted planes, the linear stability analysis is performed to investigate the influence of the physical parameters involved on the gro…
When a dilute polymer solution experiences capillary thinning, it forms an almost uniformly cylindrical thread, which we study experimentally. In the last stages of thinning, when polymers have become fully stretched, the filament becomes prone to instabilities, of which we describe two: A novel "breathing" instability, originating from the edge of the filament, and a sinusoidal instability in the interior, which ultimately gives rise to a "blistering" pattern of beads on the filament. We describe the linear instability with a spatial resolution of 80 nm in the disturbance amplitude. For suffi…
We revisit the problem of the two-dimensional spatiotemporal linear stability of viscoelastic slender jets obeying linear Phan-Thien-Tanner (PTT) stress constitutive equation, and investigate the role of finite stresses on the elasto-capilliary stability of the Beads-on-a-String (BOAS) structure (structures which include the formation of very thin filament between drops) and identify the regions of topological transition of the advancing jet interface, in the limit of low to moderate Ohnesorge number ($Oh$) and high values of Weissenberg number ($We$). The Briggs idea of analytic continuation …
Augmenting the dispersion of a solute species remains a challenging topic in electroosmotically-actuated flows due to the inherent plug-like feature of its velocity profile. In this study, we improvise on electrothermal flow of viscoelastic fluids through a parallel-plate microchannel with patterned surface charge to depict augmented dispersion coefficient of a solute. Here we consider the physical properties of the fluid to be temperature-dependent, thus, bringing out the combinatorial effect of both the thermal perturbation as well as the surface modulation on the resulting dynamics. This an…
The interaction of flexible structures with viscoelastic flows can result in very rich dynamics. In this paper, we present the results of the interactions between the flow of a viscoelastic polymer solution and a cantilevered beam in a confined microfluidic geometry. Cantilevered beams with varying length and flexibility were studied. With increasing flow rate and Weissenberg number, the flow transitioned from a fore-aft symmetric flow to a stable detached vortex upstream of the beam, to a time-dependent unstable vortex shedding. The shedding of the unstable vortex upstream of the beam imposed…
Coherent structures in Newtonian and viscoelastic turbulent planar jets
Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University（冲绳科学技术大学院大学）；Universidad Polit{é}cnica de Madrid（马德里理工大学）；Flow Matters Consultancy BV（Flow Matters咨询有限公司）
For decades, transition to turbulence in viscoelastic parallel shear flows was believed to require nonlinear instabilities. We provide numerical evidences for a new wall-mode linear instability that directly triggers the transition to elastoinertial turbulence in channel flow. The instability is 2D but 3D features become important as nonlinear effects grow. With larger disturbances, direct transition to nonlinear instabilities, leading to turbulent states of both inertial and elastoinertial natures, are observed.
We study the Marangoni instability in a thin polymeric liquid film heated from the free surface. Polymeric solutions are usually the binary mixture of a Newtonian solvent with polymeric solute and exhibit viscoelastic behaviour. In the presence of a temperature gradient, stratification of these polymeric solutes can take place via the Soret effect, which may give rise to the solutocapillary effect at the free surface. Considering the Soret effect and incorporating the effects of gravity, here we analyse the stability characteristics of this polymeric thin film bounded between its deformable fr…
Instabilities in free surface continuous jets of non-Newtonian fluids, although relevant for many industrial processes, remain less well understood in terms of fundamental fluid dynamics. Inviscid, and viscous Newtonian jets have been studied in great detail; buckling instability in viscous jets leads to regular periodic coiling of the jet that exhibits a non-trivial frequency dependence with the height of the fall. Very few experimental or theoretical studies exist for continuous viscoelastic jets beyond the onset of the first instability. Here, we present a systematic study of the effects of…
I shortly describe the main results on elastically driven instabilities and elastic turbulence in viscoelastic inertia-less flows with curved streamlines. Then I describe a theory of elastic turbulence and prediction of elastic waves at Re<<1 and Wi>>1, which speed depends on the elastic stress similarly to the Alfven waves in magneto-hydrodynamics and in in a contrast to all other fluid flows with wave speed depending on medium elasticity. Since the established and testified mechanism of elastic instability of viscoelastic flows with curvilinear streamlines becomes ineffective at zero curvatu…
We investigate the rheological characteristics of human blood plasma in shear and elongational flows. While we can confirm a Newtonian behavior in shear flow within experimental resolution, we find a viscoelastic behavior of blood plasma in the pure extensional flow of a capillary break-up rheometer. The influence of the viscoelasticity of blood plasma on capillary blood flow is tested in a microfluidic device with a contraction-expansion geometry. Differential pressure measurements revealed that the plasma has a pronounced flow resistance compared to that of pure water. Supplementary measurem…
Surface distortions to an otherwise planar channel flow introduce vorticity perturbations. We examine this scenario in viscoelastic fluids, and identify new mechanisms by which significant vorticity perturbations can be generated in both inertialess and elasto-inertial channel flows. We focus on the case where the lengthscale of the surface distortion is much longer than the channel depth, where we find significant departure from plane shear (Page & Zaki, J. Fluid Mech. 801 2016) due to the non-monotonic base-flow streamwise-normal elastic stress. In inertialess flows, a purely elastic respons…
Hydrodynamic problems with stagnation points are of particular importance in fluid mechanics as they allow study and investigation of elongational flows. In this article, the uniaxial elongational flow appearing at the surface of a viscoelastic drop and its role on the deformation of the droplet at low inertial regimes is studied. In studies related to viscoelastic droplets falling/raising in an immiscible Newtonian fluids, it is well known that by increasing the Deborah number (the ratio of the relaxation time of the interior fluid to a reference time scale) the droplet might lose its spheric…
We study theoretically the velocity cross-correlations of a viscous fluid confined in a slit between two viscoelastic media. We analyze the effect of these correlations on the motions of particles suspended in the fluid. The compliance of the confining boundaries gives rise to a long-ranged pair correlation, decaying only as $1/r$ with the interparticle distance $r$. We show how this long-ranged effect may be used to extract the viscoelastic properties of the confining media without embedding tracer particles in them. We discuss the remarkable robustness of such a potential technique with resp…
In this work, we numerically investigate the dynamics of a self-propelling autophoretic Janus particle in a weakly viscoelastic fluid. The self-propulsion is achieved by an asymmetry in the properties of the surface of the Janus particle that drives a surface slip velocity and bulk flow. Here we investigate the effect of viscoelasticity on this advection-diffusion problem over a range of Péclet and Damköhler numbers. Particles are found to swim faster, or slower, in viscoelastic fluids, and we show how reaction and diffusion rates affect the viscoelastic stresses that lead to changes in propul…
We study both numerically and experimentally the breakup of a viscoelastic liquid bridge between two parallel electrodes. We solve the leaky-dielectric FENE-P model to describe the dynamical response of the liquid bridge under isothermal conditions. The results show that the surface charge screens the inner electric field perpendicular to the free surface over the entire dynamical process. The liquid bridge deformation produces a normal electric field on the outer side of the free surface that is commensurate with the axial one. The surface conduction does not significantly affect the current …
Using branch continuation in the FENE-P model, we show that finite-amplitude travelling waves borne out of the recently-discovered linear instability of viscoelastic channel flow (Khalid et al. {\em J. Fluid Mech.} {\bf 915}, A43, 2021) are substantially subcritical reaching much lower Weissenberg ($Wi$) numbers than on the neutral curve at a given Reynolds ($Re$) number over $Re \in [0,3000]$. The travelling waves on the lower branch are surprisingly weak indicating that viscolastic channel flow is susceptible to (nonlinear) instability triggered by small finite amplitude disturbances for $Wi…
We provide numerical evidence for the existence of a cascade of filament instabilities in the surface quasigeostrophic system for atmospheric and oceanic motions near a horizontal boundary. The cascade involves geometrically shrinking spatial and temporal scales and implies the singular collapse of the filament width to zero in a finite time. The numerical method is both spatially and temporally adaptive, permitting the accurate simulation of the evolution over an unprecedented range of spatial scales spanning over ten orders of magnitude. It provides the first convincing demonstration of the …
We investigate freely expanding viscoelastic sheets. The sheets are produced by the impact of drops on a quartz plate covered with a thin layer of liquid nitrogen that suppresses shear viscous dissipation as a result of the cold Leidenfrost effect. The time evolution of the sheet is simultaneously recorded from top and side views using high-speed cameras. The investigated viscoelastic fluids are Maxwell fluids, which are characterized by low elastic moduli, and relaxation times that vary over almost two orders of magnitude, thus giving access to a large spectrum of viscoelastic and elastocapil…
We studied experimentally the breakup of liquid bridges made of aqueous solutions of Poly(acrylic acid) between two separating solid surfaces with freely moving contact lines. For polymer concentrations higher than a certain threshold ($\sim$ 30 ppm), the contact line on the surface with the highest receding contact angle fully retracts before the liquid bridge capillary breakup takes place at its neck. This means that all the liquid remains attached to the opposing surface when the surfaces are separated. This behavior occurs regardless of the range of liquid volume and stretching speed studi…
We report an investigation of the equilibrium and dynamic properties of polyelectrolyte solutions confined between platinum surfaces with a dynamic Surface Force Apparatus. The polyelectrolyte adsorbs on the surfaces in a dense compact layer bearing a surface charge in good agreement with the theoretical predictions. The flow of the solution on this charged adsorbed layer is probed over four decades of spatial scales and one decade of frequency by dynamic measurements. At distances larger than the hundredth of nanometers, the flow of the viscoelastic solution is well described by a partial sli…
When a soft glassy colloidal suspension is displaced by a Newtonian fluid in a radial Hele-Shaw geometry, the pattern morphology that develops at the interface is determined by the complex rheology of the former. We had reported in an earlier work [Palak, V. R. S. Parmar, D. Saha and R. Bandyopadhyay, JCIS Open, 6 (2022) 100047] that a range of interfacial patterns can be formed by controlling the elasticity of the displaced suspension, the flow rate of the displacing fluid and the interfacial tension of the fluid pair. Interestingly, all the different morphological features can be distinguish…
We report a technique based on Fresnel diffraction with white illumination that permits the resolution of capillary surface patterns of less than 100 nanometers. We investigate Rayleigh Plateaux like instability on a viscoelastic capillary bridge and show that we can overcome the resolution limit of optical microscopy. The viscoelastic filaments are approximately 20 microns thick at the end of the thinning process when the instability sets in. The wavy distortions grow exponentially in time and the pattern is resolved by an image treatment that is based on an approximation of the measured risi…
In this paper, we study the unsteady hydromagnetic flow of a Walter's fluid (Model B') down an open inclined channel of width 2a and depth d under gravity, the walls of the channel being normal to the surface of the bottom under the influence of a uniform transverse magnetic field. A uniform tangential stress is applied at the free surface in the direction of flow. We have evaluated the velocity distribution by using Laplace transform and finite Fourier Sine transform technique. The velocity distribution has been obtained taking different form of time dependent pressure gradient g(t), viz., i)…
Surface tension-driven flow techniques have recently emerged as an efficient means of shedding light into the rheology of thin polymer films. Motivated by experimental and theoretical approaches in films bearing a varying surface topography, we present results on the capillary relaxation of a square pattern at the free surface of a viscoelastic polymer film, using molecular dynamics simulations of a coarse-grained polymer model. Height profiles are monitored as a function of time after heating the system above its glass-transition temperature and their time dependence is fitted to the theory o…
Inertial cavitation in soft matter is an important phenomenon featured in a wide array of biological and engineering processes. Recent advances in experimental, theoretical, and numerical techniques have provided access into a world full of nonlinear physics, yet most of our quantitative understanding to date has been centered on a spherically symmetric description of the cavitation process. However, cavitation bubble growth and collapse rarely occur in a perfectly symmetrical fashion, particularly in soft materials. Predicting the onset of dynamically arising, non-spherical instabilities has …
A semi-analytical solution for the lubrication force between two spheres approaching in viscoelastic fluids described by the Oldroyd-B model under small Deborah numbers
We study theoretically the surface response of a semi-infinite viscoelastic polymer network using the two-fluid model. We focus on the overdamped limit and on the effect of the network's intrinsic length scales. We calculate the decay rate of slow surface fluctuations, and the surface displacement in response to a localized force. Deviations from the large-scale continuum response are found at length scales much larger than the network's mesh size. We discuss implications for surface scattering and microrheology. We provide closed-form expressions that can be used for surface microrheology -- …
Application of the "hairy ball theorem" to the analysis of the surface instabilities inherent for liquid/vapor interfaces is reported. When a continuous tangential velocity field exists on the surface of the liquid sample which is homeomorphic to a ball, zero velocity points will be necessarily present at the surface. The theorem is exemplified with the analysis of the instability occurring under the rapid evaporation of polymer solutions. Zero velocity points, accumulating pores, enable direct visualization of the instability. The patterning may be essentially different on the surface of a to…
Interfaces between stratified epithelia and their supporting stromas commonly exhibit irregular shapes. Undulations are particularly pronounced in dysplastic tissues and typically evolve into long, finger-like protrusions in carcinomas. In a previous work (Basan et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 158101 (2011)), we demonstrated that an instability arising from viscous shear stresses caused by the constant flow due to cell turnover in the epithelium could drive this phenomenon. While interfacial tension between the two tissues as well as mechanical resistance of the stroma tend to maintain a flat in…
