2,543 research outputs found
Walls Inhibit Chaotic Mixing
We report on experiments of chaotic mixing in a closed vessel, in which a
highly viscous fluid is stirred by a moving rod. We analyze quantitatively how
the concentration field of a low-diffusivity dye relaxes towards homogeneity,
and we observe a slow algebraic decay of the inhomogeneity, at odds with the
exponential decay predicted by most previous studies. Visual observations
reveal the dominant role of the vessel wall, which strongly influences the
concentration field in the entire domain and causes the anomalous scaling. A
simplified 1D model supports our experimental results. Quantitative analysis of
the concentration pattern leads to scalings for the distributions and the
variance of the concentration field consistent with experimental and numerical
results.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure
Using Resonances to Control Chaotic Mixing within a Translating and Rotating Droplet
Enhancing and controlling chaotic advection or chaotic mixing within liquid
droplets is crucial for a variety of applications including digital
microfluidic devices which use microscopic ``discrete'' fluid volumes
(droplets) as microreactors. In this work, we consider the Stokes flow of a
translating spherical liquid droplet which we perturb by imposing a
time-periodic rigid-body rotation. Using the tools of dynamical systems, we
have shown in previous work that the rotation not only leads to one or more
three-dimensional chaotic mixing regions, in which mixing occurs through the
stretching and folding of material lines, but also offers the possibility of
controlling both the size and the location of chaotic mixing within the drop.
Such a control was achieved through appropriate tuning of the amplitude and
frequency of the rotation in order to use resonances between the natural
frequencies of the system and those of the external forcing. In this paper, we
study the influence of the orientation of the rotation axis on the chaotic
mixing zones as a third parameter, as well as propose an experimental set up to
implement the techniques discussed.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figure
Scalar Decay in Chaotic Mixing
I review the local theory of mixing, which focuses on infinitesimal blobs of
scalar being advected and stretched by a random velocity field. An advantage of
this theory is that it provides elegant analytical results. A disadvantage is
that it is highly idealised. Nevertheless, it provides insight into the
mechanism of chaotic mixing and the effect of random fluctuations on the rate
of decay of the concentration field of a passive scalar.Comment: 35 pages, 15 figures. Springer-Verlag conference style svmult.cls
(included). Published in "Transport in Geophysical Flows: Ten Years After,"
Proceedings of the Grand Combin Summer School, 14-24 June 2004, Valle
d'Aosta, Italy. Fixed some typo
Chaotic mixing in noisy Hamiltonian systems
This paper summarises an investigation of the effects of low amplitude noise
and periodic driving on phase space transport in 3-D Hamiltonian systems, a
problem directly applicable to systems like galaxies, where such perturbations
reflect internal irregularities and.or a surrounding environment. A new
diagnsotic tool is exploited to quantify how, over long times, different
segments of the same chaotic orbit can exhibit very different amounts of chaos.
First passage time experiments are used to study how small perturbations of an
individual orbit can dramatically accelerate phase space transport, allowing
`sticky' chaotic orbits trapped near regular islands to become unstuck on
suprisingly short time scales. Small perturbations are also studied in the
context of orbit ensembles with the aim of understanding how such
irregularities can increase the efficacy of chaotic mixing. For both noise and
periodic driving, the effect of the perturbation scales roughly in amplitude.
For white noise, the details are unimportant: additive and multiplicative noise
tend to have similar effects and the presence or absence of a friction related
to the noise by a Fluctuation- Dissipation Theorem is largely irrelevant.
Allowing for coloured noise can significantly decrease the efficacy of the
perturbation, but only when the autocorrelation time, which vanishes for white
noise, becomes so large that t here is little power at frequencies comparable
to the natural frequencies of the unperturbed orbit. This suggests strongly
that noise-induced extrinsic diffusion, like modulational diffusion associated
with periodic driving, is a resonance phenomenon. Potential implications for
galaxies are discussed.Comment: 15 pages including 18 figures, uses MNRAS LaTeX macro
Topology and Fragility in Cosmology
We introduce the notion of topological fragility and briefly discuss some
examples from the literature. An important example of this type of fragility is
the way globally anisotropic Bianchi V generalisations of the FLRW model
result in a radical restriction on the allowed topology of spatial sections,
thereby excluding compact cosmological models with negatively curved
three-sections with anisotropy. An outcome of this is to exclude chaotic mixing
in such models, which may be relevant, given the many recent attempts at
employing compact FLRW models to produce chaotic mixing in the cosmic
microwave background radiation, if the Universe turns out to be globally
anisotropic.Comment: 12 pages, LaTex file, to appear in Gen. Rel. Grav. (1998
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