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Published on: May 20, 2014
Elastic instabilities of polymer solutions in cross-channel flow
P E Arratia1, C C Thomas, J Diorio
1Physics Department, Haverford College, Haverford, PA 19041, USA.
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 (< 10(-2)), 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.
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