Shear-thinning is an important rheological property of many biological fluids, such as mucus, whereby the apparent viscosity of the fluid decreases with shear. Certain microscopic swimmers have been shown to progress more rapidly through shear-thinning fluids, but is this behavior generic to all microscopic swimmers, and what are the physics through which shear-thinning rheology affects a swimm...

Phenomena such as shear thinning and thickening, occurring when complex materials are exposed to external forces, are generally believed to be closely connected to changes in the microstructure. Here, we establish a direct and quantitative relation between shear thinning in a colloidal crystal and the surface area of the locally melted region by dragging a probe particle through the crystal usi...

Non-Equilibrium Molecular Dynamics (NEMD) computer simulations were employed to study films in nanometer confinements under shear. Focusing on the response of the viscosity, we found that nearly all the shear thinning takes place inside the solid-oligomer interface and that the adsorbed layers are more viscous than the middle part of the films. Moreover, the shear thinning inside the interfacia...

flow field and heat transfer of a nanofluid, whose non-newtonian behavior has been demonstrated in the laboratory, in a square enclosure have been numerically modeled and investigated. to estimate the viscosity of nanofluid, experimental data of hong and kim, 2012 have been used, and a new model has been proposed. finally, the obtained results have been compared to those of newtonian behavior. ...

We explore the Saffman-Taylor instability of a gas bubble expanding into a shear thinning liquid in a radial Hele-Shaw cell. Using Darcy’s law generalized for non-Newtonian fluids, we perform simulations of the full dynamical problem. The simulations show that shear thinning significantly influences the developing interfacial patterns. Shear thinning can suppress tip splitting, and produce fing...

We numerically investigate the effects of non-Newtonian fluid properties, including shear thinning and elasticity, on the locomotion of Taylor’s swimming sheet with arbitrary amplitude. Our results show that elasticity hinders the swimming speed, but a shear-thinning viscosity in the absence of elasticity enhances the speed. The combination of the two effects, modelled using a Giesekus constitu...

We have used equilibrium and nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations to study the solute self-diffusion coefficient and the shear rate dependence of the solution viscosity in solutions of model nanocolloidal particles that range in mass ratio from mu=1 up to mu=50 and size ratio from s=1 up to s=4.03 at various concentrations. The zero shear rate viscosities and the initial rates of shear...

The breakup dynamics in non-Newtonian multiphase microsystems is associated with a variety of industrial applications such as food production and biomedical engineering. In this study, we numerically and experimentally characterize the dripping-to-jetting transition under various flow conditions in a Newtonian/shear-thinning multiphase microsystem. Our work can help to predict the formation of ...

Nearly all these materials have a viscosity that drops at higher rates of shear velocity resp, stress. This is the phenomenon of shear thinning which becomes progressively larger as the volume concentration of solid particles increases. At high concentration of solid content, the low shear rate viscosity region disappears completely, the material is yielding. Some materials show after the shear...