We simulate the flow of two immiscible and incompressible fluids separated by an interface in a homogeneous turbulent shear flow at a shear Reynolds number equal to 15200. The viscosity and density of the two fluids are equal, and various surface tensions and initial droplet diameters are considered in the present study. We show that the two-phase flow reaches a statistically stationary turbulent state sustained by a non-zero mean turbulent production rate due to the presence of the mean shear. Compared to single-phase flow, we find that the resulting steady state conditions exhibit reduced Taylor microscale Reynolds numbers owing to the presence of the dispersed phase, which acts as a sink of turbulent kinetic energy for the carrier fluid. At steady state, the mean power of surface tension is zero and the turbulent production rate is in balance with the turbulent dissipation rate, with their values being larger than in the reference single-phase case. The interface modifies the energy spectrum by introducing energy at small-scales, with the difference from the single-phase case reducing as the Weber number increases. This is caused by both the number of droplets in the domain and the total surface area increasing monotonically with the Weber number. This reflects also in the droplets size distribution which changes with the Weber number, with the peak of the distribution moving to smaller sizes as the Weber number increases. We show that the Hinze estimate for the maximum droplet size, obtained considering breakup in homogeneous isotropic turbulence, provides an excellent estimate notwithstanding the action of significant coalescence and the presence of a mean shear. † Email address for correspondence: merosti@mech.kth.se arXiv:1902.05259v2 [physics.flu-dyn]

Aiming for the simulation of colloidal droplets in microfluidic devices, we present here a numerical method for two-fluid systems subject to surface tension and depletion forces among the suspended droplets. The algorithm is based on an efficient solver for the incompressible two-phase Navier-Stokes equations, and uses a mass-conserving level set method to capture the fluid interface. The four novel ingredients proposed here are, firstly, an interface-correction level set (ICLS) method; global mass conservation is achieved by performing an additional advection near the interface, with a correction velocity obtained by locally solving an algebraic equation, which is easy to implement in both 2D and 3D. Secondly, we report a second-order accurate geometric estimation of the curvature at the interface and, thirdly, the combination of the ghost fluid method with the fast pressurecorrection approach enabling an accurate and fast computation even for large density contrasts. Finally, we derive a hydrodynamic model for the interaction forces induced by depletion of surfactant micelles and combine it with a multiple level set approach to study short-range interactions among droplets in the presence of attracting forces.

Motivated by the emerging applications of liquid-infused surfaces (LIS), we study the drag reduction and robustness of transverse flows over two-dimensional microcavities partially filled with an oily lubricant. Using separate simulations at different scales, characteristic contact line velocities at the fluid-solid intersection are first extracted from nano-scale phase field simulations and then applied to micron-scale two-phase flows, thus introducing a multiscale numerical framework to model the interface displacement and deformation within the cavities. As we explore the various effects of the lubricant-to-outer-fluid viscosity ratioμ 2 /μ 1 , the capillary number Ca, the static contact angle θ s , and the filling fraction of the cavity δ, we find that the effective slip is most sensitive to the parameter δ. The effects ofμ 2 /μ 1 and θ s are generally intertwined, but weakened if δ < 1. Moreover, for an initial filling fraction δ = 0.94, our results show that the effective slip is nearly independent of the capillary number, when it is small. Further increasing Ca to about 0.01μ 1 /μ 2 , we identify a possible failure mode, associated with lubricants draining from the LIS, forμ 2 /μ 1 0.1. Very viscous lubricants (e.g.μ 2 /μ 1 > 1), on the other hand, are immune to such failure due to their generally larger contact line velocity.

Systematic numerical simulations reveal the hydrodynamic mechanism of droplet interactions, guiding the microfluidic design for production of future photonic materials.

We describe and summarize a class of minimal numerical models emerged from recent development of simulation methods for dense particle suspensions in overdamped linear flows. The main ingredients include (i) a frame-invariant, short-range lubrication model for spherical particles, and (ii) a soft-core, stick/slide frictional contact model activated when particles overlap. We implement a version of the model using a modified velocity-Verlet algorithm that explicitly solves the N -body dynamical system in O(cN ) operations, where c is a kernel constant depending on the cutoff of particle interactions. The implementation is validated against literature results on jamming transition and shear thickening suspensions from 40% to 64% volume fractions. Potential strategies to extend the present methodology to non-spherical particles are also suggested for very concentrated suspensions.