Experimental and theoretical studies of cross-stream migration of non-spherical particles in a quadratic flow of a viscoelastic fluid

Abstract

We experimentally investigate the cross-stream migration of spherical, prolate, and oblate particles in a circular tube flow of a weakly viscoelastic fluid (De = O(10-2)) with negligible inertia (Re≈ 0)....

Dynamics of non-spherical particles in viscoelastic fluids flowing in a microchannel

“…Hence, in this case, a channel of 5 cm is sufficient to focus only the particles with aspect ratio relatively low, and a longer channel is required for more elongated particles. These results agree with what reported in Tai and Narsimhan 33 where the fastest migration was found for spheres.…”

“…In this regard, an important step forward is the very recent experimental paper by Tai and Narsimhan 33 that follows a series of theoretical works from the same authors. 34–36 Both the experimental conditions and the theory assumptions are such that the Deborah number (denoted by De and defined as the ratio between the fluid and flow characteristic times) is very small.…”

Continuous Manufacturing of Microfluidic Fibers Embedded with Ordered Microparticles via Ionic Gelation

“…Currently, only very little has been done with respect to the ordering of nonspherical particles. To the best of our knowledge, there are only experiments performed to evaluate the transversal migration of spheroids in viscoelastic liquids (no ordering) 54 and numerical simulations on the interactions between pairs of spheroids at different values of the aspect ratio. 33 The numerical simulations 33 suggests that the ordering of spheroid is possible; however, no evidence has been presented so far.…”

Cell deformability heterogeneity recognition by unsupervised machine learning from in-flow motion parameters

“…Thus, the interplay of size, shape and deformability plays a fundamental role in the definition of cell equilibrium positions and local cell velocities for alignment and separation purposes. [27][28][29][30][31][32][33] Recently, a straightforward viscoelastic-based microfluidic approach was used to in-flow compress cells in a controlled and precise manner and to analyse compressed cells by coupling the classical descriptors of morphological and shape alterations with in-flow orientation angles. 34 Inspired by the motion dynamics laws known for RBCs, [35][36][37][38][39][40] we already demonstrated that suspended cancer and healthy breast cells with variable cell deformations (CDs) and aspect ratios (ARs) followed multiple in-flow trajectories defined as rolling (R), tumbling (T) and tank-treading (TT).…”

“…Thus, the interplay of size, shape and deformability plays a fundamental role in the definition of cell equilibrium positions and local cell velocities for alignment and separation purposes. 27–33…”