Linear stability of channel flow with microgroove-type anisotropic superhydrophobic walls

TL;DR

This study analyzes how microgroove-induced slip effects on superhydrophobic walls influence the linear stability of channel flow, revealing conditions that lower the critical Reynolds number and potentially enhance mixing or heat transfer.

Contribution

It provides new insights into the stability of channel flow with anisotropic superhydrophobic walls, showing that two walls always yield lower critical Reynolds numbers and that increasing anisotropy further reduces stability thresholds.

Findings

Two superhydrophobic walls always have the lowest critical Reynolds number.

Increasing slip anisotropy lowers the critical Reynolds number.

Parallel microgrooves on both walls optimize flow instability.

Abstract

We study the temporal linear instability of channel flow subject to a tensorial slip boundary condition that models the slip effect induced by microgroove-type super-hydrophobic surfaces. The microgrooves are not necessarily aligned with the driving pressure gradient. Pralits et al. Phys. Rev. Fluids 2, 013901 (2017) investigated the same problem and reported that a proper tilt angle of the microgrooves about the driving pressure gradient can reduce the critical Reynolds number and that the flow with a single superhydrophobic wall is much more unstable/less stable than that with two superhydrophobic walls. In contrast, we show that the lowest critical Reynolds number is always realized with two superhydrophobic walls, and we obtain critical Reynolds numbers significantly lower than the reported. Besides, we show that the critical Reynolds number can be further reduced by increasing the anisotropy in the slip length. As the tilt angle changes, there appears to be a strong correlation between the strength of the instability and the magnitude of the cross-flow component of the base flow incurred by the tilt angle. In case the tilt angles of the microgrooves differ on the two walls, the critical Reynolds number increases as the difference in the tilt angles increases, i.e. two superhydrophobic walls with parallel microgrooves give the lowest critical Reynolds number. The results are informative for designing the microgroove-type wall texture to introduce instability at low Reynolds number channel flow, which may be of interest for enhancing mixing or heat transfer in small flow systems where turbulence cannot be triggered.