Optimal wavy surface to suppress vortex shedding using second-order sensitivity to shape changes

A method to find optimal 2nd-order perturbations is presented, and applied to find the optimal spanwise-wavy surface for suppression of cylinder wake instability. Second-order perturbations are required to capture the stabilizing effect of spanwise waviness, which is ignored by standard adjoint-based sensitivity analyses. Here, previous methods are extended so that (i) 2nd-order sensitivity is formulated for base flow changes satisfying linearised Navier-Stokes, and (ii) the resulting method is applicable to a 2D global instability problem. This makes it possible to formulate 2nd-order sensitivity to shape modifications. Using this formulation, we find the optimal shape to suppress the a cylinder wake instability. The optimal shape is then perturbed by random distributions in full 3D stability analysis to confirm that it is a local optimal at the given amplitude and wavelength. Furthermore, it is shown that none of the 10 random wavy shapes alone stabilize the wake flow at Re=50, while the optimal shape does. At Re=100, surface waviness of maximum height 1% of the cylinder diameter is sufficient to stabilize the flow. The optimal surface creates streaks by passively extracting energy from the base flow derivatives and effectively altering the tangential velocity component at the wall, as opposed to spanwise-wavy suction which inputs energy to the normal velocity component at the wall. This paper presents a fully two-dimensional and computationally affordable method to find optimal 2nd-order perturbations of generic flow instability problems and any boundary control (such as boundary forcing, shape modulation or suction).Comment: 19 pages, 6 figure

A dual resolution phase‐field solver for wetting of viscoelastic droplets

We present a new and efficient phase-field solver for viscoelastic fluids with moving contact line based on a dual-resolution strategy. The interface between two immiscible fluids is tracked by using the Cahn-Hilliard phase-field model, and the viscoelasticity incorporated into the phase-field framework. The main challenge of this approach is to have enough resolution at the interface to approach the sharp-interface methods. The method presented here addresses this problem by solving the phase field variable on a mesh twice as fine as that used for the velocities, pressure, and polymer-stress constitutive equations. The method is based on second-order finite differences for the discretization of the fully coupled Navier-Stokes, polymeric constitutive, and Cahn-Hilliard equations, and it is implemented in a 2D pencil-like domain decomposition to benefit from existing highly scalable parallel algorithms. An FFT-based solver is used for the Helmholtz and Poisson equations with different global sizes. A splitting method is used to impose the dynamic contact angle boundary conditions in the case of large density and viscosity ratios. The implementation is validated against experimental data and previous numerical studies in 2D and 3D. The results indicate that the dual-resolution approach produces nearly identical results while saving computational time for both Newtonian and viscoelastic flows in 3D

General hydrodynamic features of elastoviscoplastic fluid flows through randomised porous media

A numerical study of yield-stress fluids flowing in porous media is presented. The porous media is randomly constructed by non-overlapping mono-dispersed circular obstacles. Two class of rheological models are investigated: elastoviscoplastic fluids (i.e. Saramito model) and viscoplastic fluids (i.e. Bingham model). A wide range of practical Weissenberg and Bingham numbers is studied at three different levels of porosities of the media. The emphasis is on revealing some physical transport mechanisms of yield-stress fluids in porous media when the elastic behaviour of this kind of fluids is incorporated. Thus, computations of elastoviscoplastic fluids are performed and are compared with the viscoplastic fluid flow properties. At a constant Weissenberg number, the pressure drop increases both with the Bingham number and the solid volume fraction of obstacles. However, the effect of elasticity is less trivial. At low Bingham numbers, the pressure drop of an elastoviscoplastic fluid increases compared to a viscoplastic fluid, while at high Bingham numbers we observe drag reduction by elasticity. At the yield limit (i.e. infinitely large Bingham numbers), elasticity of the fluid systematically promotes yielding: elastic stresses help the fluid to overcome the yield stress resistance at smaller pressure gradients. We observe that elastic effects increase with both Weissenberg and Bingham numbers. In both cases, elastic effects finally make the elastoviscoplastic flow unsteady, which consequently can result in chaos and turbulence. Keywords: Yield-stress fluids; Viscoplastic fluids; Elastoviscoplastic fluids; Porous medi

Stability of particles inside yield-stress fluid Poiseuille flows

The stability of neutrally and non-neutrally buoyant particles immersed in a plane Poiseuille flow of a yield-stress fluid (Bingham fluid) is addressed numerically. Particles being carried by the yield-stress fluid can behave in different ways: they might (i) migrate inside the yielded regions or (ii) be transported without any relative motion inside the unyielded region if the yield stress is large enough compared to the buoyancy stress and the other stresses acting on the particles. Knowing the static stability of particles inside a bath of quiescent yield-stress fluid (Chaparian & Frigaard, J.A Fluid Mech., vol.A 819, 2017, pp.A 311-351), we analyse the latter behaviour when the yield-stress fluid Poiseuille flow is host to two-dimensional particles. Numerical experiments reveal that particles lose their stability (i.e. break the unyielded plug and sediment/migrate) with smaller buoyancy compared to the sedimentation inside a bath of quiescent yield-stress fluid, because of the inherent shear stress in the Poiseuille flow. The key parameter in interpreting the present results is the position of the particle relative to the position of the yield surface in the undisturbed flow (in the absence of any particle): the larger the portion of a particle located inside the undisturbed sheared regions, the more likely is the particle to be unstable. Yet, we find that the core unyielded plug can grow locally to some extent to contain the particles. This picture holds even for neutrally buoyant particles, although they are strictly stable when they are located wholly inside the undisturbed plug. We propose scalings for all cases

Effect of viscosity ratio on the self-sustained instabilities in planar immiscible jets

Previous studies have shown that intermediate magnitude of surface tension has a counterintuitive destabilizing effect on two-phase planar jets. In the present study, the transition process in confined two-dimensional jets of two fluids with varying viscosity ratio is investigated using direct numerical simulations (DNSs). The outer fluid coflow velocity is 17% of that of the central jet. Neutral curves for the appearance of persistent oscillations are found by recording the norm of the velocity residuals in DNS for over 1000 nondimensional time units or until the signal has reached a constant level in a logarithmic scale, either a converged steady state or a “statistically steady” oscillatory state. Oscillatory final states are found for all viscosity ratios ranging from 10−1 to 10. For uniform viscosity (m=1), the first bifurcation is through a surface-tension-driven global instability. On the other hand, for low viscosity of the outer fluid, there is a mode competition between a steady asymmetric Coanda-type attachment mode and the surface-tension-induced mode. At moderate surface tension, the first bifurcation is through the Coanda-type attachment, which eventually triggers time-dependent convective bursts. At high surface tension, the first bifurcation is through the surface-tension-dominated mode. For high viscosity of the outer fluid, persistent oscillations appear due to a strong convective instability, although it is shown that absolute instability may be possible at even higher viscosity ratios. Finally, we show that the jet is still convectively and absolutely unstable far from the inlet when the shear profile is nearly constant. Comparing this situation to a parallel Couette flow (without inflection points), we show that in both flows, a hidden interfacial mode brought out by surface tension becomes temporally and absolutely unstable in an intermediate Weber and Reynolds regime. By an energy analysis of the Couette flow case, we show that surface tension, although dissipative, can induce a velocity field near the interface that extracts energy from the flow through a viscous mechanism. This study highlights the rich dynamics of immiscible planar uniform-density jets, where different self-sustained and convective mechanisms compete and the nature of the instability depends on the exact parameter values

Sliding flows of yield-stress fluids

A theoretical and numerical study of complex sliding flows of yield-stress fluids is presented. Yield-stress fluids are known to slide over solid surfaces if the tangential stress exceeds the sliding yield stress. The sliding may occur due to various microscopic phenomena such as the formation of an infinitesimal lubrication layer of the solvent and/or elastic deformation of the suspended soft particles in the vicinity of the solid surfaces. This leads to a 'stick-slip' law which complicates the modelling and analysis of the hydrodynamic characteristics of the yield-stress fluid flow. In the present study, we formulate the problem of sliding flow beyond one-dimensional rheometric flows. Then, a numerical scheme based on the augmented Lagrangian method is presented to attack these kind of problems. Theoretical tools are developed for analysing the flow/no-flow limit. The whole framework is benchmarked in planar Poiseuille flow and validated against analytical solutions. Then two more complex physical problems are investigated: slippery particle sedimentation and pressure-driven sliding flow in porous media. The yield limit is addressed in detail for both flow cases. In the particle sedimentation problem, method of characteristics - slipline method - in the presence of slip is revisited from the perfectly plastic mechanics and used as a helpful tool in addressing the yield limit. Finally, flows through model and randomized porous media are studied. The randomized configuration is chosen to capture more sophisticated aspects of the yield-stress fluid flows in porous media at the yield limit - channelization

An efficient mass-preserving interface-correction level set/ghost fluid method for droplet suspensions under depletion forces

Aiming for the simulation of colloidal droplets in microfluidic devices, we present here a numerical method for two-fluid systems subject to surface tension and depletion forces among the suspended droplets. The algorithm is based on an efficient solver for the incompressible two-phase Navier–Stokes equations, and uses a mass-conserving level set method to capture the fluid interface. The four novel ingredients proposed here are, firstly, an interface-correction level set (ICLS) method; global mass conservation is achieved by performing an additional advection near the interface, with a correction velocity obtained by locally solving an algebraic equation, which is easy to implement in both 2D and 3D. Secondly, we report a second-order accurate geometric estimation of the curvature at the interface and, thirdly, the combination of the ghost fluid method with the fast pressurecorrection approach enabling an accurate and fast computation even for large density contrasts. Finally, we derive a hydrodynamic model for the interaction forces induced by depletion of surfactant micelles and combine it with a multiple level set approach to study short-range interactions among droplets in the presence of attracting forces