Slow growth of the Rayleigh-Plateau instability in aqueous two phase systems

This paper studies the Rayleigh-Plateau instability for co-flowing immiscible aqueous polymer solutions in a microfluidic channel. Careful vibration-free experiments with controlled actuation of the flow allowed direct measurement of the growth rate of this instability. Experiments for the well-known aqueous two phase system (ATPS, or aqueous...

Polymer flexibility and turbulent drag reduction

Polymer-induced drag reduction is the phenomenon by which the friction factor of a turbulent flow is reduced by the addition of small amounts of high-molecular-weight linear polymers, which conformation in solution at rest can vary between randomly coiled and rodlike. It is well known that drag reduction is positively correlated to viscous...

Brownian particles in transient polymer networks

We discuss the thermal motion of colloidal particles in transient polymer networks. For particles that are physically bound to the surrounding chains, light-scattering experiments reveal that the submillisecond dynamics changes from diffusive to Rouse-like upon crossing the network formation threshold. Particles that are not bound do not show...

Flow of polymer solutions through porous media

These days leading oil and gas producing companies are investing increasing amounts of money into the development of non-fossil energy sources like wind-, solar-, biomass energy and forestry. On the other hand these companies are persisting in developing techniques to make energy recovery more efficient intending to stretch the life span of...

The dynamics in polyethyleneoxide–alkali iodide complexes investigated by neutron spin-echo spectroscopy and molecular dynamics simulations

We determined the self part of the intermediate scattering function in liquid polyethyleneoxide (PEO) and PEO–alkali iodide complexes by means of neutron spin-echo spectroscopy and molecular dynamics (MD) computer simulations. We present the first accurate quantitative results on the segmental dynamics in the time range up to 1 ns and the wave...