No Arabic abstract
The growth dynamics of an air finger injected in a visco-elastic gel (a PVA/borax aqueous solution) is studied in a linear Hele-Shaw cell. Besides the standard Saffmann-Taylor instability, we observe - with increasing finger velocities - the existence of two new regimes: (a) a stick-slip regime for which the finger tip velocity oscillates between 2 different values, producing local pinching of the finger at regular intervals, (b) a ``tadpole regime where a fracture-type propagation is observed. A scaling argument is proposed to interpret the dependence of the stick-slip frequency with the measured rheological properties of the gel.
We discuss the stick-slip motion of an elastic block sliding along a rigid substrate. We argue that for a given external shear stress this system shows a discontinuous nonequilibrium transition from a uniform stick state to uniform sliding at some critical stress which is nothing but the Griffith threshold for crack propagation. An inhomogeneous mode of sliding occurs, when the driving velocity is prescribed instead of the external stress. A transition to homogeneous sliding occurs at a critical velocity, which is related to the critical stress. We solve the elastic problem for a steady-state motion of a periodic stick-slip pattern and derive equations of motion for the tip and resticking end of the slip pulses. In the slip regions we use the linear viscous friction law and do not assume any intrinsic instabilities even at small sliding velocities. We find that, as in many other pattern forming system, the steady-state analysis itself does not select uniquely all the internal parameters of the pattern, especially the primary wavelength. Using some plausible analogy to first order phase transitions we discuss a ``soft selection mechanism. This allows to estimate internal parameters such as crack velocities, primary wavelength and relative fraction of the slip phase as function of the driving velocity. The relevance of our results to recent experiments is discussed.
We consider the problem of viscous fingering in the presence of quenched disorder that is both weak and short-range correlated. The two point correlation function of the harmonic measure is calculated perturbatively, and is used in order to calculate the correction the the box-counting fractal dimension. We show that the disorder increases the fractal dimension, and that its effect decreases logarithmically with the size of the fractal.
In the technique of microrheology, macroscopic rheological parameters as well as information about local structure are deduced from the behavior of microscopic probe particles under thermal or active forcing. Microrheology requires knowledge of the relation between macroscopic parameters and the force felt by a particle in response to displacements. We investigate this response function for a spherical particle using the two-fluid model, in which the gel is represented by a polymer network coupled to a surrounding solvent via a drag force. We obtain an analytic solution for the response function in the limit of small volume fraction of the polymer network, and neglecting inertial effects. We use no-slip boundary conditions for the solvent at the surface of the sphere. The boundary condition for the network at the surface of the sphere is a kinetic friction law, for which the tangential stress of the network is proportional to relative velocity of the network and the sphere. This boundary condition encompasses both no-slip and frictionless boundary conditions as limits. Far from the sphere there is no relative motion between the solvent and network due to the coupling between them. However, the different boundary conditions on the solvent and network tend to produce different far-field motions. We show that the far field motion and the force on the sphere are controlled by the solvent boundary conditions at high frequency and by the network boundary conditions at low frequency. At low frequencies compression of the network can also affect the force on the sphere. We find the crossover frequencies at which the effects of sliding of the sphere past the polymer network and compression of the gel become important.
A thin solid (e.g., paper), burning against an oxidizing wind, develops a fingering instability with two decoupled length scales. The spacing between fingers is determined by the Peclet number (ratio between advection and diffusion). The finger width is determined by the degree two dimensionality. Dense fingers develop by recurrent tip splitting. The effect is observed when vertical mass transport (due to gravity) is suppressed. The experimental results quantitatively verify a model based on diffusion limited transport.
We discuss the results of simulations of an intruder pulled through a two-dimensional granular system by a spring, using a model designed to lend insight into the experimental findings described by Kozlowski et al. [Phys. Rev. E, 100, 032905 (2019)]. In that previous study the presence of basal friction between the grains and the base was observed to change the intruder dynamics from clogging to stick-slip. Here we first show that our simulation results are in excellent agreement with the experimental data for a variety of experimentally accessible friction coefficients governing interactions of particles with each other and with boundaries. Then, we use simulations to explore a broader range of parameter space, focusing on the friction between the particles and the base. We consider a range of both static and dynamic basal friction coefficients, which are difficult to vary smoothly in experiments. The simulations show that dynamic friction strongly affects the stick-slip behaviour when the coefficient is decreased below 0.1, while static friction plays only a marginal role in the intruder dynamics.