At present, little is known about how endothelial cells respond to spatial variations in fluid shear stress such as those that occur locally during embryonic development, at heart valve leaflets, and at sites of aneurysm formation. We built an impinging flow device that exposes endothelial cells to gradients of shear stress. Using this device, we investigated the response of microvascular endothelial cells to shear-stress gradients that ranged from 0 to a peak shear stress of 9-210 dyn/cm(2). We observe that at high confluency, these cells migrate against the direction of fluid flow and concentrate in the region of maximum wall shear stress, whereas low-density microvascular endothelial cells that lack cell-cell contacts migrate in the flow direction. In addition, the cells align parallel to the flow at low wall shear stresses but orient perpendicularly to the flow direction above a critical threshold in local wall shear stress. Our observations suggest that endothelial cells are exquisitely sensitive to both magnitude and spatial gradients in wall shear stress. The impinging flow device provides a, to our knowledge, novel means to study endothelial cell migration and polarization in response to gradients in physical forces such as wall shear stress.

Interfaces differ from bulk materials in many ways, one particular aspect is that they are compressible. Changing the area per molecule or per particle changes the thermodynamic state variables such as surface pressure. Yet, when compressing to high surface pressures, dense packing of the interfacial species induces phase transitions, with highly structured phases, which can display elastic or strongly viscoelastic behaviour. When these are deformed, in addition to the changes in the surface pressure, extra and deviatoric stresses can be induced. The traditional tool to study the phase behaviour of monolayers is a rectangular Langmuir-Pockels trough, but as both the area and shape of the interface are changed upon compression, the interfacial-strain field in this instrument is mixed with a priori unknown amounts of dilatational and shear deformations, making it difficult to separate the rheological and equilibrium thermodynamic effects. In the present work, the design of a radial trough is described, in which the deformation field is simple, purely dilation or compression. The possibility to now independently measure the compressional properties of different strains and the development of an appropriate finite strain constitutive model for elastic interfaces make it possible to interrogate the underlying constitutive behaviour. This is shown here for a strongly elastic, soft glassy polymer monolayer during its initial compression but is easily generalised to many viscoelastic soft matter interfaces.

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Several technological applications, consumer products, and biological systems derive their functioning from the presence of a complex fluid interface with viscoelastic interfacial rheological properties. Measurements of the "excess" rheological properties of such an interface are complicated by the intimate coupling of the bulk and interfacial flows. In the present work, analytical, numerical, and experimental results of the interfacial flow fields in a magnetic rod interfacial stress rheometer (ISR) are presented. Mathematical solutions are required to correct the experimentally determined apparent interfacial shear moduli and phase angles for the drag exerted by the surrounding phases, especially at low Boussinesq numbers. Starting from the Navier-Stokes equations and using the generalized Boussinesq-Scriven equation as a suitable boundary condition, the problem is solved both analytically and numerically. In addition, experimental data of the interfacial flow field are reported, obtained by following the trajectories of tracer particles at the interface with time. Good agreement is found between the three methods, indicating that both the analytical solution and the numerical simulations give an adequate description of the flow field and the resulting local interfacial shear rate at the rod. Based on these results, an algorithm to correct the experimental data of the ISR is proposed and evaluated, which can be extended to different types of interfacial shear rheometers and geometries. An increased accuracy is obtained and the measurement range of the ISR is expanded toward viscosities and elastic moduli of smaller magnitude.