Chemical production on a deforming substrate

The interplay between chemical reaction and substrate deformation is discussed by adapting Ranz's formulation for scalar mixing to the case of a reactive mixture between segregated reactants, initially separated by an interface whose thickness may not be vanishingly small. Experiments in a simple shear flow demonstrate the existence of three regimes depending on the Damköhler number $Da=t_s/t_c$ where $t_s$ is the mixing time of the interface width and $t_c$ is the chemical time. Instead of treating explicitly the chemical cross-term, we rationalize these different regimes by globalizing it as a production term involving a flux which depends on the rate at which the reaction zone is fed by the reactants, a formulation valid for $Da>1$ . For $Da<1$ , the reactants interpenetrate before they react, giving rise to a ‘diffusio-chemical’ regime where chemical production occurs within a substrate whose width is controlled by molecular diffusion.

Thermally Fluctuating, Semiflexible Sheets in Simple Shear Flow

We perform Brownian dynamics simulations of semiflexible colloidal sheets with hydrodynamic interactions and thermal fluctuations in shear flow. As a function of the ratio of bending rigidity to shear energy...