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Polymers in turbulence: any better than dumbbells?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 May 2024

F. Serafini
Affiliation:
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Sapienza University of Rome, via Eudossiana 18, 00184 Rome, Italy
F. Battista*
Affiliation:
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Sapienza University of Rome, via Eudossiana 18, 00184 Rome, Italy
P. Gualtieri
Affiliation:
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Sapienza University of Rome, via Eudossiana 18, 00184 Rome, Italy
C.M. Casciola
Affiliation:
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Sapienza University of Rome, via Eudossiana 18, 00184 Rome, Italy
*
Email address for correspondence: francesco.battista@uniroma1.it

Abstract

Polymer chains in turbulent flows are generally modelled as dumbbells, i.e. two beads joined by a nonlinear spring. The dumbbell only maps a single spatial configuration, described by the polymer end-to-end vector, thus a multi-bead FENE (finitely extensible nonlinear elastic) chain seems a natural improvement for a more accurate characterisation of the polymer spatial conformation. At a large Weissenberg number, a comparison with the more accurate Kuhn chain reveals that the multi-bead FENE chain drastically overestimates the probability of folded configurations. Surprisingly, the dumbbell turns out to be the only meaningful bead-spring model to coarse-grain a polymer macromolecule in turbulent pipe flows.

Information

Type
JFM Rapids
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press.
Figure 0

Figure 1. The $g(N)$ for the FENE chain and FJC. Solid green line reports the analytic prediction given by the Rouse model, in case of $N\gg 1$.

Figure 1

Figure 2. The p.d.f. of the normalised end-to-end distance $R/L$ (a), and of the link length $r/l$ (b), for FENE chains with different numbers of beads. The solid black line in (a) reports the p.d.f. for the Kuhn chain ($N=201$), taken as reference for all the other coarse-grained models.

Figure 2

Figure 3. (ac) Joint p.d.f. of the normalised end-to-end distance $R/L$ and the normalised radius of gyration $R_g/L$ for the 3-bead FENE chain at $Wi=10^4,10,10^2$, respectively. (d) Sketch of two reference polymer configurations. Configuration A represents a 3-bead chain with two aligned links with same length $r\le l$. Configuration B represents a 3-bead chain with fully extended links misaligned by an angle $\alpha$.

Figure 3

Figure 4. Joint p.d.f. of the normalised end-to-end distance $R/L$ and the normalised radius of gyration $R_g/L$ for the Kuhn chain ($N=201$) (a), and for the FENE chain with $N=21$ (b), at Weissenberg number $Wi=10^4$.

Figure 4

Figure 5. The p.d.f. of the normalised end-to-end distance $R/L$ for FJCs with different numbers of beads at Weissenberg number $Wi=10^4$.