Electric-field-induced turbulent energy cascade in an oil-in-oil emulsion

Abstract

We observe electro-hydrodynamically driven turbulent flows at low Reynolds numbers in a two-fluid emulsion consisting of micron-scale droplets. In the presence of electric fields, the droplets produce interacting hydrodynamic flows which result in a dynamical organization at a spatial scale much larger than the size of the individual droplets. We characterize the dynamics associated with these structures by both video imaging and a simultaneous, in situ, measurement of the time variation of the bulk Reynolds stress with a rheometer. The results display scale invariance in the energy spectra in both space and time.

4 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Emergence of macroscopic directed motion in populations of motile colloids
• Meso-scale turbulence in living fluids
• Entropy and energy spectra in low-Prandtl-number convection with rotation

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Electrohydrodynamics of viscous drops in strong electric fields: Numerical simulations
• Spontaneous mirror-symmetry breaking induces inverse energy cascade in 3D active fluids
• Geometry-dependent viscosity reduction in sheared active fluids
• Anomalous dynamics in tracer-particle motions in an electrohydrodynamically driven oil-in-oil system