Start-up inertia as an origin for heterogeneous flow.

For quite some time nonmonotonic flow curve was thought to be a requirement for shear banded flows in complex fluids. Thus, in simple yield stress fluids shear banding was considered to be absent. Recent spatially resolved rheological experiments have found simple yield stress fluids to exhibit shear banded flow profiles. One proposed mechanism for the initiation of such transient shear banding process has been a small stress heterogeneity rising from the experimental device geometry. Here, using computational fluid dynamics methods, we show that transient shear banding can be initialized even under homogeneous stress conditions by the fluid start-up inertia, and that such mechanism indeed is present in realistic experimental conditions.

Apparent wall slip in non-Brownian hard-sphere suspensions.

We analyze apparent wall slip, the reduction of particle concentration near the wall, in hard-sphere suspensions at concentrations well below the jamming limit utilizing a continuum level diffusion model. The approach extends a constitutive equation proposed earlier with two additional potentials describing the effects of gravitation and wall-particle repulsion. We find that although both mechanisms are shear independent by nature, due to the shear-rate-dependent counter-balancing particle migration fluxes, the resulting net effect is non-linearly shear dependent, causing larger slip at small shear rates. In effect, this shows up in the classically measured flow curves as a mild shear thickening regime at the transition from small to intermediate shear rates.

Dynamic hysteresis in the rheology of complex fluids.

Recently, rheological hysteresis has been studied systematically in a wide range of complex fluids combining global rheology and time-resolved velocimetry. In this paper we present an analysis of the roles of the three most fundamental mechanisms in simple-yield-stress fluids: structure dynamics, viscoelastic response, and spatial flow heterogeneities, i.e., time-dependent shear bands. Dynamical hysteresis simulations are done analogously to rheological ramp-up and -down experiments on a coupled model which incorporates viscoelasticity and time-dependent structure evolution. Based on experimental data, a coupling between hysteresis measured from the local velocity profiles and that measured from the global flow curve has been suggested. According to the present model, even if transient shear banding appears during the shear ramps, in typical narrow-gap devices, only a small part of the hysteretic response can be attributed to heterogeneous flow. This results in decoupling of the hysteresis measured from the local velocity profiles and the global flow curve, demonstrating that for an arbitrary time-dependent rheological response this proposed coupling can be very weak.

Rheology dynamics of aggregating colloidal suspensions.

We study a colloidal model based on population balances in the context of complex fluid rheology. Two typical particle microstructure kinetics, orthokinetic, collisions due to shear, and perikinetic, collisions due to Brownian motion, are found to appear at continuum as different flow behaviors - those having monotonic and non-monotonic flow curves, respectively. Solving the colloidal model together with the 1D Stokes equation for laminar, incompressible flow with Couette boundary conditions, allows bridging the gap between the rheological experiments and the microstructural modeling. The analysis of such a model reveals that orthokinetic particle suspensions have a uniquely defined, continuous steady state shear profile, whereas suspensions in which also perikinetic collisions are present, the steady state can be shear banded and non-unique. Thus, the shear banded configurations at a steady state are found to depend on the initial conditions and the collision kinetics of the system. At high shear rates all the studied cases show continuous shear profiles.

Transient shear banding in time-dependent fluids.

We study the dynamics of shear-band formation and evolution using a simple rheological model. The description couples the local structure and viscosity to the applied shear stress. We consider in detail the Couette geometry, where the model is solved iteratively with the Navier-Stokes equation to obtain the time evolution of the local velocity and viscosity fields. It is found that the underlying reason for dynamic effects is the nonhomogeneous shear distribution, which is amplified due to a positive feedback between the flow field and the viscosity response of the shear thinning fluid. This offers a simple explanation for the recent observations of transient shear banding in time-dependent fluids. Extensions to more complicated rheological systems are considered.

Patterns, entropy, and predictability of human mobility and life.

Cellular phones are now offering an ubiquitous means for scientists to observe life: how people act, move and respond to external influences. They can be utilized as measurement devices of individual persons and for groups of people of the social context and the related interactions. The picture of human life that emerges shows complexity, which is manifested in such data in properties of the spatiotemporal tracks of individuals. We extract from smartphone-based data for a set of persons important locations such as "home", "work" and so forth over fixed length time-slots covering the days in the data-set (see also [1], [2]). This set of typical places is heavy-tailed, a power-law distribution with an exponent close to -1.7. To analyze the regularities and stochastic features present, the days are classified for each person into regular, personal patterns. To this are superimposed fluctuations for each day. This randomness is measured by "life" entropy, computed both before and after finding the clustering so as to subtract the contribution of a number of patterns. The main issue that we then address is how predictable individuals are in their mobility. The patterns and entropy are reflected in the predictability of the mobility of the life both individually and on average. We explore the simple approaches to guess the location from the typical behavior, and of exploiting the transition probabilities with time from location or activity A to B. The patterns allow an enhanced predictability, at least up to a few hours into the future from the current location. Such fixed habits are most clearly visible in the working-day length.