Oscillatory and electrohydrodynamic instabilities in flow over a viscoelastic gel

Abstract

The stability of oscillatory flows over compliant surfaces is studied analytically and numerically. The type of compliant surfaces studied is the incompressible viscoelastic gel model. The stability is determined using the Floquet analysis, where amplitude of perturbations at time intervals separated by one time period is examined to determine whether perturbations grow or decay. Oscillatory flows pas viscoelastic gels exhibit an instability in the limit of zero Reynolds number, and the transition amplitude of the oscillatory velocity increases with the frequency of oscillations. The transition amplitude has a minimum at a finite wavenumber for the viscoelastic gel model. The instability is found to depend strongly on the gel viscosity η g , and the effect of oscillations on the continuation of viscous modes at intermediate Reynolds number shows a complicated dependence on the oscillation frequency. Experimental studies are carried out on the stability of an oscillatory flow past a viscoelastic gel at zero Reynolds number, and these confirm the theoretical predictions.