Tumbling of a Brownian particle in an extensional flow

Abstract

The phenomenon of tumbling of microscopic objects is commonly associated with shear flows. We address the question of whether tumbling can also occur in stretching-dominated flows. To answer this, we study the dynamics of a semi-flexible trumbbell in a planar extensional velocity field. We show that the trumbbell undergoes a random tumbling-through-folding motion. The probability distribution of long tumbling times is exponential with a time scale exponentially increasing with the Weissenberg number.

11 pages, 8 figures, to be published in Proc. R. Soc. A

References in corpus (2)

• The large deviation approach to statistical mechanics
• Tumbling of polymers in semidilute solution under shear flow

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Self-induced hydrodynamic coil-stretch transition of active polymers