No Arabic abstract
The use of microscopic discrete fluid volumes (i.e., droplets) as microreactors for digital microfluidic applications often requires mixing enhancement and control within droplets. In this work, we consider a translating spherical liquid droplet to which we impose a time periodic rigid-body rotation which we model using the superposition of a Hill vortex and an unsteady rigid body rotation. This perturbation in the form of a rotation not only creates a three-dimensional chaotic mixing region, which operates through the stretching and folding of material lines, but also offers the possibility of controlling both the size and the location of the mixing. Such a control is achieved by judiciously adjusting the three parameters that characterize the rotation, i.e., the rotation amplitude, frequency and orientation of the rotation. As the size of the mixing region is increased, complete mixing within the drop is obtained.
A weakly deformable droplet impinging on a rigid surface rebounds if the surface is intrinsically hydrophobic or if the gas film trapped underneath the droplet is able to keep the interfaces from touching. A simple, physically motivated model inspired by analysis of droplets colliding with deformable interfaces is proposed in order to investigate the dynamics of the rebound process and the effects of gravity. The analysis yields estimates of the bounce time that are in very good quantitative agreement with recent experimental data (Okumura et. al., (2003)) and provides significant improvement over simple scaling results.
Geometric confinements play an important role in many physical and biological processes and significantly affect the rheology and behavior of colloidal suspensions at low Reynolds numbers. On the basis of the linear Stokes equations, we investigate theoretically and computationally the viscous azimuthal flow induced by the slow rotation of a small spherical particle located in the vicinity of a rigid no-slip disk or inside a gap between two coaxially positioned rigid no-slip disks of the same radius. We formulate the solution of the hydrodynamic problem as a mixed-boundary-value problem in the whole fluid domain, which we subsequently transform into a system of dual integral equations. Near a stationary disk, we show that the resulting integral equation can be reduced into an elementary Abel integral equation that admits a unique analytical solution. Between two coaxially positioned stationary disks, we demonstrate that the flow problem can be transformed into a system of two Fredholm integral equations of the first kind. The latter are solved by means of numerical approaches. Using our solution, we further investigate the effect of the disks on the slow rotational motion of a colloidal particle and provide expressions of the hydrodynamic mobility as a function of the system geometry. We compare our results with corresponding finite-element simulations and observe very good agreement.
The distribution of liquid water in ice-free clouds determines their radiative properties, a significant source of uncertainty in weather and climate models. Evaporation and turbulent mixing cause a cloud to display large variations in droplet-number density, but quite small variations in droplet size [Beals et al. (2015)]. Yet direct numerical simulations of the joint effect of evaporation and mixing near the cloud edge predict quite different behaviors, and it remains an open question how to reconcile these results with the experimental findings. To infer the history of mixing and evaporation from observational snapshots of droplets in clouds is challenging because clouds are transient systems. We formulated a statistical model that provides a reliable description of the evaporation-mixing process as seen in direct numerical simulations, and allows to infer important aspects of the history of observed droplet populations, highlighting the key mechanisms at work, and explaining the differences between observations and simulations.
A liquid droplet, immersed into a Newtonian fluid, can be propelled solely by internal flow. In a simple model, this flow is generated by a collection of point forces, which represent externally actuated devices or model autonomous swimmers. We work out the general framework to compute the self-propulsion of the droplet as a function of the actuating forces and their positions within the droplet. A single point force, F with general orientation and position, r_0, gives rise to both, translational and rotational motion of the droplet. We show that the translational mobility is anisotropic and the rotational mobility can be nonmonotonic as a function of | r_0|, depending on the viscosity contrast. Due to the linearity of the Stokes equation, superposition can be used to discuss more complex arrays of point forces. We analyse force dipoles, such as a stresslet, a simple model of a biflagellate swimmer and a rotlet, representing a helical swimmer, driven by an external magnetic field. For a general force distribution with arbitrary high multipole moments the propulsion properties of the droplet depend only on a few low order multipoles: up to the quadrupole for translational and up to a special octopole for rotational motion. The coupled motion of droplet and device is discussed for a few exemplary cases. We show in particular that a biflagellate swimmer, modeled as a stresslet, achieves a steady comoving state, where the position of the device relative to the droplet remains fixed. In fact there are two fixpoints, symmetric with respect to the center of the droplet. A tiny external force selects one of them and allows to switch between forward and backward motion.
A rigorous derivation and validation for linear fluid-structure-interaction (FSI) equations for a rigid-body-motion problem is performed in an Eulerian framework. We show that the added-stiffness terms arising in the formulation of Fanion et al. (2000) vanish at the FSI interface in a first-order approximation. Several numerical tests with rigid-body motion are performed to show the validity of the derived formulation by comparing the time evolution between the linear and non-linear equations when the base flow is perturbed by identical small-amplitude perturbations. In all cases both the growth rate and angular frequency of the instability matches within $0.1%$ accuracy. The derived formulation is used to investigate the phenomenon of symmetry breaking for a rotating cylinder with an attached splitter-plate. The results show that the onset of symmetry breaking can be explained by the existence of a zero-frequency linearly unstable mode of the coupled fluid-structure-interaction system. Finally, the structural sensitivity of the least stable eigenvalue is studied for an oscillating cylinder, which is found to change significantly when the fluid and structural frequencies are close to resonance.