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 study the pinch-off dynamics of droplets of yield stress and shear thinning fluids. To separate the two non-Newtonian effects, we use a yield stress material for which the yield stress can be tuned without changing the shear thinning behavior, and a shear thinning system (without a yield stress) for which the shear thinning can be controlled over a large range, without introducing too much e...

Early progress in non-Newtonian fluid mechanics was facilitated by the emergence of two fundamental and complementary principles: objective constitutive characterizations and unambiguous identification of irreversible processes. Motivated by practical and economic concerns in recent years, this line of fluid research has expanded to include debris flows, slurries, biofluids and fluid-solid mixt...

The article provides a new definition of rheological similarity and thus a new basis for the modeling of non-Newtonian fluids: Fluids, whose rheological functions =f( ) can be twist-free shifted in a log/log field to a common master curve are rheologically similar and can be mutually used as model fluids in model experiments. This thesis is theoretically explained and confirmed by evaluation o...

The excellent performance of fluidized bed heat exchangers is due to the interaction between particles and heat transfer surface and to the mixing effects in the viscous sublayer. In this paper, the results of experimental investigations on heat transfer for a wide range of Newtonian and non-Newtonian (shear-thinning power law) fluids are presented. New design equations have been developed ...

Bubble flows in non-Newtonian fluids were analyzed using first-principles methods with the aim to compute and predict mass transfer coefficients in such fermentation media. The method we used is a Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) of the reactive multiphase flow with deformable boundaries and interfaces. With this method, we are able for the first time to calculate mass transfer coefficients in...