Viscous fingering of a draining suspension

Yun Chen, Frank Malambri, and Sungyon Lee
Phys. Rev. Fluids 3, 094001 – Published 24 September 2018

Abstract

The liquid drainage is a commonplace process that affects a wide array of industrial applications ranging from medical procedures and manufacturing processes to food processing. While many drainage-related applications involve the complex fluids comprising solid particles, the effects of suspended particles on the liquid drainage have not been considered, leaving simple fundamental questions on the suspension drainage unanswered. In this paper, we experimentally investigate the effects of particles on drainage by withdrawing suspensions from an air-filled Hele-Shaw cell in a radial sink flow. As expected, viscous fingering arises as air invades a draining viscous suspension. Despite numerous studies on viscous fingering, only a few have studied this “inward” viscous fingering for pure liquids and none for suspensions. We find that, while the overall behavior of fingering remains unchanged from the pure liquid case, suspended particles are shown to delay the onset of fingering but also to accelerate its growth rate. This surprising dual effect of particles results in the increase of the total drainage time and in the amount of drained suspension as a function of particle concentrations. In addition, the particle entrainment into the thin film of wetting oil causes particles with select sizes to remain on the channel walls instead of draining, which closely follows our simple theoretical prediction.

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  • Received 20 June 2017

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevFluids.3.094001

©2018 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Fluid Dynamics

Authors & Affiliations

Yun Chen1, Frank Malambri2, and Sungyon Lee1,*

  • 1Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455, USA
  • 2Department of Aerospace Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas 77843, USA

  • *sungyon@umn.edu

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Issue

Vol. 3, Iss. 9 — September 2018

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