Films and molds of nematic polymer materials are notorious for heterogeneity in the orientational distribution of the rigid rod or platelet macromolecules. Predictive tools for structure length scales generated by shear-dominated processing are vitally important: both during processing because of flow feedback phenomena such as shear thinning or thickening, and postprocessing since gradients in...

A novel methodology, based on the use of phosphorescence imaging, is applied to determine the local through-thickness velocity profile of lubricant in an elastohydrodynamic contact. The technique has spatial and temporal resolutions of 40 μm and 340 μs respectively and thus allows lubricant rheology to be investigated at conditions close to service conditions. The capability of the newly-develo...

Articles you may be interested in Boundary layer dynamics at the transition between the classical and the ultimate regime of Taylor-Couette flow Building on the weakly nonlinear amplitude equation of the saturated Taylor vor-tices developing in a Taylor–Couette cell with a rotating inner cylinder and a fixed outer one, the physical mechanism underlying the destabilization of these vortices resu...

In spite of many attempts to model dense granular flow, there is still no general theory capable of describing different types of flows, such as gravity-driven drainage in silos and wall-driven shear flows in Couette cells. Here, we summarize our recent proposal of the Stochastic Flow Rule (SFR), which is able to describe these cases in good agreement with experiments, and we focus on testing t...

The scaling of velocity structure functions in Couette-Taylor flow [Lewis and Swinney, Phys. Rev. E 59, 5457 (1999)] is revisited to obtain more accurate values of the scaling exponents for the Reynolds number range investigated, 12,000 to 540,000 (Taylor Reynolds numbers, 34<R(lambda)<220). Systematic convergence of the statistics with increasing sample size is examined, and the uncertainty of...

A Hopf bifurcation with translational invariance has been widely considered as an appropriate model for the appearance of spiral vortices in counter-rotating Taylor-Couette flow. Our experimental work demonstrates that flow conditions close to the axial boundaries are responsible for the type of bifurcation scenario, i.e., either asymmetric pure traveling waves or more complex behavior, such as...

New flows and instabilities are demonstrated for magnetic fluids and by dual analogy to dielectric fluids. If a fluid drop is contained in a thin gap between two glass plates (Hele–Shaw cell) with a simultaneously applied in-plane rotating field and a DC axial field, smooth spirals or an abrupt transformation to many small droplets can occur. A preliminary minimum magnetization and surface ener...