Purely-elastic flow instabilities, elastic turbulence and an engineering application

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• Professor Robert Poole, Dept of Engineering, University of Liverpool
• Thursday 28 May 2015, 12:00-13:00
• Open Plan Area, BP Institute, Madingley Rise CB3 0EZ.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Catherine Pearson.

Highly-elastic viscoelastic fluid flows can undergo a series of flow transitions from viscometric laminar flow, to periodic flow, to apparently chaotic flow, and then to fully developed elastic turbulence in conditions of negligible inertia in a range of flows. At such low Reynolds numbers the flows are far from the inertially-driven turbulence observed for Newtonian fluids (which usually occurs at Re on the order of 1000 for internal flows) and are purely-elastic in nature. By “purely-elastic” we mean driven by non-linear elastic (normal) stresses that develop in flowing complex fluids. Flow through a serpentine (or wavy) channel is one such geometry where an elastic instability has been observed experimentally [1]. Here we report the results or a combined numerical and experimental investigation to determine the variation of the critical Weissenberg number (Wi) with the channel curvature [2]. Using this understanding we have also proposed a novel micro-rheometer [3]. Finally, we shall discuss one engineering application of elastic turbulence namely the enhancement of heat transfer in microfluidics applications [4].

This talk is part of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Flows (IEEF) series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• Cambridge Energy Seminars
• Department of Earth Sciences seminars
• Institute for Energy and Environmental Flows (IEEF)
• NanoDTC Energy Materials Talks
• Open Plan Area, BP Institute, Madingley Rise CB3 0EZ
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