Lubrication theory

About: Lubrication theory is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1713 publications have been published within this topic receiving 50261 citations. The topic is also known as: Fluid bearing.

Contact line instability of gravity-driven flow of power-law fluids

Abstract: The moving contact line of a thin fluid film can often corrugate into fingers, which is also known as a fingering instability. Although the fingering instability of Newtonian fluids has been studied extensively, there are few studies published on contact line fingering instability of non-Newtonian fluids. In particular, it is still unknown how shear-thinning rheological properties can affect the formation, growth, and shape of a contact line instability. Our previous study (Hu and Kieweg, 2012) showed a decreased capillary ridge formation for more shear-thinning fluids in a 2D model (i.e. 1D thin film spreading within the scope of lubrication theory). Those results motivated this study's hypothesis: more shear-thinning fluids should have suppressed finger growth and longer finger wavelength, and this should be evident in linear stability analysis (LSA) and 3D (i.e. 2D spreading) numerical simulations. In this study, we developed a LSA model for the gravity-driven flow of shear-thinning films, and carried out a parametric study to investigate the impact of shear-thinning on the growth rate of the emerging fingering pattern. A fully 3D model was also developed to compare and verify the LSA results using single perturbations, and to explore the result of multiple-mode, randomly imposed perturbations. Both the LSA and 3D numerical results confirmed that the contact line fingers grow faster for Newtonian fluids than the shear-thinning fluids on both vertical and inclined planes. In addition, both the LSA and 3D model indicated that the Newtonian fluids form fingers with shorter wavelengths than the shear-thinning fluids when the plane is inclined; no difference in the most unstable (i.e. emerging) wavelength was observed at vertical. This study also showed that the distance between emerging fingers was smaller on a vertical plane than on a less-inclined plane for shear-thinning fluids, as previously shown for Newtonian fluids. For the first time for shear-thinning fluids, these results connect trends in capillary ridge and contact line finger formation in 2D models, LSA, and 3D simulations. The results can provide us insights on how to optimize non-Newtonian fluid properties to minimize a fingering instability in many industrial and biological applications.

Two-fluid pressure-driven channel flow with wall deposition and ageing effects

Abstract: Two-fluid, stratified pressure-driven channel flow is studied in the limit of small viscosity ratios. Cases are considered in which the core fluid undergoes phase separation that results in the ‘precipitation’ of a distinct phase and the formation of a wall layer; these situations are common in the oil industry where ‘fouling’ deposits are formed during the flow. The thickness of this layer increases as a result of continual deposition through Stefan-like fluxes, which are related to the phase behaviour of the core fluid through a chemical equilibria model that treats the fluid as a bi-component mixture. The deposit also undergoes an ‘ageing’ process whereby its viscosity increases due to the build-up of internal structure; the latter is modelled here via a Coussot-type relation. Lubrication theory is used in the wall layer and an integral balance in the core fluid wherein inertial effects are important. By choosing appropriate semi-parabolic velocity and temperatures closures for the laminar flow in the channel core, and a closure relation for the wall layer rheology, evolution equations are derived that describe the flow dynamics. In the presence of ageing but absence of deposition, it is demonstrated how the time-varying deposit rheology alters the wave dynamics; for certain parameter ranges, these effects can give rise to the formation of steep waves and what appears to be finite-time ‘blow-up’. With both ageing and deposition, the spatio-temporal evolution of the deposit is shown together with the increase in the deposition rate with increasing temperature difference between the wall and the inlet.