Elastic Instabilities of Polymer Solutions in Cross-Channel Flow
- 14 April 2006
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Physical Society (APS) in Physical Review Letters
- Vol. 96 (14), 144502
- https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.96.144502
Abstract
When polymer molecules pass near the hyperbolic point of a microchannel cross flow, they are strongly stretched. As the strain rate is varied at low Reynolds number (), tracer and particle-tracking experiments show that molecular stretching produces two flow instabilities: one in which the velocity field becomes strongly asymmetric, and a second in which it fluctuates nonperiodically in time. The flow is strongly perturbed even far from the region of instability, and this phenomenon can be used to produce mixing.
Keywords
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