Shear-thinning is an important rheological property of many biological fluids, such as mucus, whereby the apparent viscosity of the fluid decreases with shear. Certain microscopic swimmers have been shown to progress more rapidly through shear-thinning fluids, but is this behavior generic to all microscopic swimmers, and what are the physics through which shear-thinning rheology affects a swimm...

We numerically investigate the effects of non-Newtonian fluid properties, including shear thinning and elasticity, on the locomotion of Taylor’s swimming sheet with arbitrary amplitude. Our results show that elasticity hinders the swimming speed, but a shear-thinning viscosity in the absence of elasticity enhances the speed. The combination of the two effects, modelled using a Giesekus constitu...

the effect of weak shear thickening and shear thinning on the stability of the taylor-couette flow is explored for a carreau-bird fluid in the narrow-gap limit. the galerkin projection method is used to derive a low-order dynamical system from the conservation of mass and momentum equations. in comparison with the newtonian system, the present equations include additional nonlinear coupling in ...

The aim of this work is to develop a unique in vitro set-up in order to analyse the influence of the shear thinning fluid-properties on the flow dynamics within the bulge of an abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA). From an experimental point of view, the goals are to elaborate an analogue shear thinning fluid mimicking the macroscopic blood behaviour, to characterise its rheology at low shear rates ...

Colloidal suspensions exhibit shear thinning and shear thickening. The most common interpretation of these phenomena identifies layering of the fluid perpendicular to the shear gradient as the driver for the observed behavior. However, studies of the particle configurations associated with shear thinning and thickening cast doubt on that conclusion and leave unsettled whether these nonequilibri...

We study the Saffman-Taylor instability of a non-Newtonian fluid in a Hele-Shaw cell. Using a fluid model with shear-rate dependent viscosity, we derive a Darcy’s law whose viscosity depends upon the squared pressure gradient. This yields a natural, nonlinear boundary value problem for the pressure. A model proposed recently by Bonn et al. @Phys. Rev. Lett. 75, 2132 ~1995!# follows from this mo...

We have studied the flow induced by a macroscopic spherical particle settling in a Laponite suspension that exhibits a yield-stress, thixotropy and shear-thinning. We show that the fluid thixotropy (or aging) induces an increase with time of both the apparent yield stress and shear-thinning properties but also a breaking of the flow fore-aft symmetry predicted in Hershel-Bulkley fluids (yield-s...

Droplet impact dynamics of the shear-thinning fluids on the hydrophobic surfaces have been experimentally studied and compared to the base fluid, water. In this work, hydrogels are prepared by lading water with Polyacrylamide polymer at three loading rates 1, 2, and 3 wt. %. The resultant hydrogel phase behaves as a shear thinning fluid with altered rheophysical properties. The presence of poly...

In this study, the stirring mechanism of shear-thinning fluids benefiting from four blades in turbulent flow is considered. The fluid is studied inside a stirred cylindrical tank with a flat bottom. The height of fluid is equal to the cylinder’s diameter and the impeller is positioned centrally. A CFD simulation has been carried out and three-dimensional turbulent flow is numerically analyzed u...

The present investigation draws scholars' attention to the effect of exponential variable viscosity modeled by Vogel and variable permeability on stagnation point flow of Carreau Nanofluid over an electromagnetic plate through a porous medium. Brownian motion and thermophoretic diffusion mechanism are taken into consideration. An efficient fourth-order RK method along with shooting technique ar...