CNS Meeting
Monday 21 October 2002, 11:00 AM, W505 Howey

Tugging at Polymers in Turbulent Flow: The Polymers Tug Back

Jean-Luc Thiffeault

In the absence of flow, long polymers in dilute solution tend to tangle up in balls. But in the presence of strain, they uncoil and begin to exert a stress on the fluid. A polymer solution is thus well-described as a viscoelastic flow. A simple model of turbulence, where the strain is a random variable delta-correlated in time, is used to predict the average length and induced stress of the polymers.



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