Efficient mixing at low Reynolds numbers using polymer additives

Mixing at Low Reynolds Numbers by Vibrating Cantilevered Ionic Polymers

............................................................................................................................... i Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................. ii

Enhanced Mixing at Low Reynolds Numbers Through Elastic Turbulence

A generic nonlinear Maxwell model for the stress tensor in viscoelastic materials is studied under mixing scenarios in a three-dimensional steady lid-driven cavity flow. Resulting laminar and turbulent flow profiles are investigated to study their mixing efficiencies. Massless tracer particles and passive concentrations are included to show that the irregular spatio-temporal chaos, present in t...

Noisy swimming at low Reynolds numbers.

Small organisms (e.g., bacteria) and artificial microswimmers move due to a combination of active swimming and passive Brownian motion. Considering a simplified linear three-sphere swimmer, we study how the swimmer size regulates the interplay between self-driven and diffusive behavior at low Reynolds number. Starting from the Kirkwood-Smoluchowski equation and its corresponding Langevin equati...

Shear layer instability at low reynolds numbers

Optimal swimming at low Reynolds numbers.

Efficient swimming at low Reynolds numbers is a major concern of microbots. To compare the efficiencies of different swimmers we introduce the notion of "a swimming drag coefficient" which allows for the ranking of swimmers. We find the optimal swimmer within a certain class of two-dimensional swimmers using conformal mapping techniques.