Yield-stress fluids, including gels and pastes, are effectively fluid at high stress and solid at low stress. In liquid-solid impacts, the fluid motion can be halted by the yield stress at different points of the event, and these fluids can therefore stick and accumulate where they impact, motivating several applications of these rheologically complex materials. Here, we use high-speed imaging to experimentally study liquid-solid impact of yield-stress fluids on pre-coated horizontal surfaces. With a pre-coating of the same material, we can observe large long-lifetime ejection sheets with redirected momentum which extend away from the impact location. Under critical splash conditions, sheet breakup occurs and ejected droplets can be nonspherical and threadlike due to the inability of capillary stresses to deform material above a certain lengthscale. By varying the droplet size, impact velocity, surface coating thickness, and rheological material properties, we develop appropriate dimensionless parameters and present a low-dimensional regime map of impact behaviors. C 2015 AIP Publishing LLC. [http://dx.
Understanding mixing and transport of passive scalars in active fluids is important to many natural (e.g., algal blooms) and industrial (e.g., biofuel, vaccine production) processes. Here, we study the mixing of a passive scalar (dye) in dilute suspensions of swimming Escherichia coli in experiments using a two-dimensional (2D) time-periodic flow and in a simple simulation. Results show that the presence of bacteria hinders large-scale transport and reduces overall mixing rate. Stretching fields, calculated from experimentally measured velocity fields, show that bacterial activity attenuates fluid stretching and lowers flow chaoticity. Simulations suggest that this attenuation may be attributed to a transient accumulation of bacteria along regions of high stretching. Spatial power spectra and correlation functions of dye-concentration fields show that the transport of scalar variance across scales is also hindered by bacterial activity, resulting in an increase in average size and lifetime of structures. On the other hand, at small scales, activity seems to enhance local mixing. One piece of evidence is that the probability distribution of the spatial concentration gradients is nearly symmetric with a vanishing skewness. Overall, our results show that the coupling between activity and flow can lead to nontrivial effects on mixing and transport.
We demonstrate that a simple thixotropic-viscoelastic constitutive model has a unique rheological fingerprint that fits data that no other model is known to fit. The key rheological signature is the non-integer power law scaling in asymptotically-nonlinear large-amplitude oscillatory shear (LAOS), sometimes called medium-amplitude oscillatory shear (MAOS). We begin with a minimalist constitutive model that contains only five material parameters, which we show to be the minimum required to capture all fundamental thixotropic and viscoelastic phenomena. We demonstrate that the low amplitude power-law scaling of the asymptotically nonlinear first and third harmonic stresses (scaling as input amplitude squared) is different than that observed in all other known constitutive model predictions (which predict nonlinearities to scale as input amplitude cubed). We then explore the effects of a sixth model parameter n (the most common addition to thixotropic models in the literature), introduced to govern the order of the kinetic rate equation. We show that this parameter gives further variability to this unique signature (with nonlinearities scaling as 1 n
Viscoplastic fluids, also known as yield-stress fluids, can stick and accumulate where they impact. Here we experimentally study conditions for open surfaces to be impermeable to impacting yield-stress fluid drops, and the dynamic conditions for these drops to permeate and coat internal aspects of a complex topography. We experimentally study drops of model yield stress fluids (Carbopol microgel particles in water) impacting open solid meshes (rigid surfaces with small, evenly spaced openings). High speed video reveals dynamics across a range of behavior, from 0% to 100% transmittance, by varying drop size, impact velocity, mesh geometry, and rheological material properties. When inertial stresses are sufficiently high compared to the yield stress, a drop can pass through a mesh, breaking into smaller fluid particles with varying shapes, sizes, and velocities in the process. In contrast, when inertial stresses are sufficiently low compared to the yield stress, a drop can stick to the mesh as though it were a solid surface, inhibited from passing through the holes by the yield stress. Layers of multiple meshes are also examined, demonstrating a range of behaviors and the ability to coat internal aspects of complex topography. Dimensional analysis is performed to characterize material transmittance and velocity of transmitted droplets as a function of dimensionless input parameters.
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