Ridged geometries induce axial flow vortices in Couette systems

TL;DR

This study investigates how wall patterning in Couette systems induces orthogonal flow vortices in yield stress and Newtonian fluids, revealing that flow in two directions significantly influences each other, with implications for understanding complex flow behaviors.

Contribution

It demonstrates that wall patterning can generate and control orthogonal flows in yield stress fluids, showing their mutual influence and providing insights into flow behavior in patterned geometries.

Findings

Orthogonal flows are significantly affected by wall patterning.

Flow penetration depth correlates with axial flow in yield stress fluids.

Flow in two directions influences each other in Couette systems.

Abstract

A yield stress fluid has a critical stress above which the material starts to flow. Typically, the yield stress behaviour is captured in the Herschel-Bulkley (HB) model, which assumes a constant yield stress as material parameter. It is not clear whether the simultaneous superposition of a flow in an orthogonal direction to the main flow, that displays HB behaviour, affects the yield stress and will make the yield stress either flow rate- or field-dependent. Therefore, it is important to understand how the presence of flow in two orthogonal directions affects the yielding behaviour of the fluid in general. In this work, we showed that wall patterning can be used to generate flow in two orthogonal directions simultaneously. We find that these orthogonal flows measurably affected each other. We induced spatially varying secondary flows by shearing a standard Newtonian fluid and two common yield stress fluids in a rheometer using a concentric cylinder geometry with angled ridges. We measured the normal force as a function of rotation rates for different angled ridges from conventional rheological measurements. We also imaged the flow fields by employing rheo-MRI, to directly measure the penetration depth of the fluids into the rough boundary of the ridged geometry. Finally, we relate the penetration depth to the axial flow for different geometries, at different imposed rotation rates and the fluid type, to show that two flow directions in the yield stress fluids are indeed significantly related to each other.