No Arabic abstract
The majority of investigations characterizing the motion of single or multiple particles in fluid flows consider canonical body shapes, such as spheres, cylinders, discs, etc. However, protrusions on bodies -- being either as surface imperfections or appendages that serve a function -- are ubiquitous in both nature and applications. In this work, we characterize how the dynamics of a sphere with an axis-symmetric wake is modified in the presence of thin three-dimensional elliptic-shaped protrusions. By investigating a wide range of three-dimensional appendages with different aspect ratios and lengths, we clearly show that the sphere with an appendage may robustly undergo an inverted-pendulum-like (IPL) instability. This means that the position of the appendage placed behind the sphere and aligned with the free-stream direction is unstable, in a similar way that an inverted pendulum is unstable under gravity. Due to this instability, non-trivial forces are generated on the body, leading to turn and drift, if the body is free to fall under gravity. Moreover, we identify the aspect ratio and length of the appendage that induces the largest side force on the sphere, and therefore also the largest drift for a freely falling body. Finally, we explain the physical mechanisms behind these observations in the context of the IPL instability, i.e., the balance between surface area of the appendage exposed to reversed flow in the wake and the surface area of the appendage exposed to fast free-stream flow.
We study transport of a weakly diffusive pollutant (a passive scalar) by thermoconvective flow in a fluid-saturated horizontal porous layer heated from below under frozen parametric disorder. In the presence of disorder (random frozen inhomogeneities of the heating or of macroscopic properties of the porous matrix), spatially localized flow patterns appear below the convective instability threshold of the system without disorder. Thermoconvective flows crucially effect the transport of a pollutant along the layer, especially when its molecular diffusion is weak. The effective (or eddy) diffusivity also allows to observe the transition from a set of localized currents to an almost everywhere intense global flow. We present results of numerical calculation of the effective diffusivity and discuss them in the context of localization of fluid currents and the transition to a global flow. Our numerical findings are in a good agreement with the analytical theory we develop for the limit of a small molecular diffusivity and sparse domains of localized currents. Though the results are obtained for a specific physical system, they are relevant for a broad variety of fluid dynamical systems.
A stochastic approach is implemented to address the problem of a marine structure exposed to water wave impacts. The focus is on (i) the average frequency of wave impacts, and (ii) the related probability distribution of impact kinematic variables. The wave field is assumed to be Gaussian. The seakeeping motions of the considered body are taken into account in the analysis. The coupling of the stochastic model with a water entry model is demonstrated through the case study of a foil exposed to wave impacts.
Guided by extensive numerical simulations, we propose a microfluidic device that can sort elastic capsules by their deformability. The device consists of a duct embedded with a semi-cylindrical obstacle, and a diffuser which further enhances the sorting capability. We demonstrate that the device can operate reasonably well under changes in the initial position of the the capsule. The efficiency of the device remains essentially unaltered under small changes of the obstacle shape (from semi-circular to semi-elliptic cross-section). Confinement along the direction perpendicular to the plane of the device increases its efficiency. This work is the first numerical study of cell sorting by a realistic microfluidic device.
In this video, we present the dynamics of an array of falling particles at intermediate Reynolds numbers. The film shows the vorticity plots of 3, 4, 7, 16 falling particles at $Re = 200$. We highlight the effect of parity on the falling configuration of the array. In steady state, an initially uniformly spaced array forms a convex shape when $n=3$, i.e the middle particle leads, but forms a concave shape when $n = 4$. For larger odd numbers of particles, the final state consists of a mixture of concave and convex shapes. For larger even numbers of particles, the steady state remains a concave shape. Below a threshold of initial particle spacing, particles cluster in groups of 2 to 3.
The dynamics of periodic swimming is studied for two models of a deformable sphere, the dipole-quadrupole model and the quadrupole-octupole model. For the two models the solution of the Navier-Stokes equations can be found exactly to second order in the amplitude of stroke. Hence the oscillating force exerted by the fluid on the body is calculated. This allows calculation of the periodic time-dependent center of mass velocity.