2017-sasms-NatComm.pdf (2.42 MB)
Hydrodynamic cavitation in Stokes flow of anisotropic fluids
journal contribution
posted on 2018-10-02, 07:57 authored by Tillmann Stieger, Hakam Agha, Martin Schoen, Marco MazzaMarco Mazza, Anupam SenguptaCavitation, the nucleation of vapour in liquids, is ubiquitous in fluid dynamics, and is often implicated in a myriad of industrial and biomedical applications. Although extensively studied in isotropic liquids, corresponding investigations in anisotropic liquids are largely lacking. Here, by combining liquid crystal microfluidic experiments, nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations and theoretical arguments, we report flow-induced cavitation in an anisotropic fluid. The cavitation domain nucleates due to sudden pressure drop upon flow past a cylindrical obstacle within a microchannel. For an anisotropic fluid, the inception and growth of the cavitation domain ensued in the Stokes regime, while no cavitation was observed in isotropic liquids flowing under similar hydrodynamic parameters. Using simulations we identify a critical value of the Reynolds number for cavitation inception that scales inversely with the order parameter of the fluid. Strikingly, the critical Reynolds number for anisotropic fluids can be 50% lower than that of isotropic fluids.
Funding
T.S. and M.S. gratefully acknowledge financial support by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) within the framework of the ‘International Graduate Reaserch Training Group’ 1524, and M.G.M. thanks the Max Planck Society for funding. A.S. thanks Human Frontier Science Program Cross Disciplinary Fellowship (LT000993/2014-C) for supporting the research.
History
School
- Science
Department
- Mathematical Sciences
Published in
Nature CommunicationsVolume
8Citation
STIEGER, T. ... et al, 2017. Hydrodynamic cavitation in Stokes flow of anisotropic fluids. Nature Communications, 8, Article number 15550.Publisher
Nature Publishing Group © The Author(s)Version
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Acceptance date
2017-04-07Publication date
2017-05-30Notes
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ISSN
2041-1723eISSN
2041-1723Publisher version
Language
- en