Cross-stream migration of droplets in a confined shear-thinning viscoelastic flow: Role of shear-thinning induced lift
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Shear-thinning viscoelastic (STVE) flows exhibit intriguing phenomena owing to their complex rheology and the coupling of various forces involved. Here, we present an understanding of the cross-stream migration of droplets in a confined STVE flow and unravel the role of a shear-thinning induced lift force (FSM) in their dynamical behavior. We perform experiments with popular STVE liquids of different molecular weights and concentrations (c) for Reynolds numbers Re < 1 and Weissenberg numbers Wi = 0.01–7.4. Our results reveal larger droplets (of drop-to-channel ratio β ≥ 0.28) that follow their original streamlines, whereas smaller droplets (β ≤ 0.2) exhibit center ward migration and the migration rates depend upon the drop-to-medium viscosity (k) and elasticity (ξ) ratios. The lateral displacement of droplets is tracked using high-speed imaging that is used to estimate the relevant forces using suitable correlations. We find that the migration dynamics of droplets is underpinned by the non-inertial lift (FNIL), viscoelastic lift (FVM, FVD), and shear-thinning induced lift (FSM) forces. We provide experimental evidence of the proposed FSM and, from analytical scaling and empirical modeling, develop an expression for FSM ∼ ΔμΔγ̇D3.7/h1.7 (with R2 = 0.95) for an object at a distance h from the wall and with a drop in viscosity Δμ and strain rate Δγ̇ across its diameter D. Our study sheds light on the underlying dynamics on droplets in an STVE medium and opens up avenues for sorting and focusing of drops in an STVE medium at low Re.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".