For the last decade our research in soft matter hydrodynamics was concentarted mostly on dynamics of soft objects such as vesicles, capsules, and red blood cells in a linear flow and its relation to rheology of their suspensions. Another subject was a further investigation and characterization of various aspects of elastic turbulence in swirling and curvilinear channel flows on hydrodynamic and a single polymer approaches.
Another direction of studies was convective and hydrodynamic turbulence. The former was a turbulent convection of fluid near its gas-liquid critical point, where a strong symmetrical non-Boussinesq turbulent convection was found and characterized. The latter was turbulent von Karman swirling flow between two counter-rotating disks with and without polymers. The turbulent drag reduction in such a flow was particularly studied in details.
Currently, as a continuation of our efforts, we have three main tasks. First is to search for an experimental system which would satisfy assumptions made in theory of elastic turbulence in order to carry on a quantitative comparison with experimental results. Second is to experimentally establish a direct relation between elastic turbulence and turbulent drag reduction in the same flow geometry and experimental setup. And third is to verify and investigate in details our finding of a breaking of self-similarity in a swirling turbulent flow driven inertially.
Nonlinear Physics and Fluid Dynamics Lab
