Activity pulses induce spontaneous flow reversals in viscoelastic environments.

Complex interactions between cellular systems and their surrounding extracellular matrices are emerging as important mechanical regulators of cell functions, such as proliferation, motility and cell death, and such cellular systems are often characterized by pulsating actomyosin activities. Here, using an active gel model, we numerically explore spontaneous flow generation by activity pulses in the presence of a viscoelastic medium. The results show that cross-talk between the activity-induced deformations of the viscoelastic surroundings and the time-dependent response of the active medium to these deformations can lead to the reversal of spontaneously generated active flows. We explain the mechanism behind this phenomenon based on the interaction between the active flow and the viscoelastic medium. We show the importance of relaxation time scales of both the polymers and the active particles and provide a phase space over which such spontaneous flow reversals can be observed. Our results suggest new experiments investigating the role of controlled pulses of activity in living systems ensnared in complex mircoenvironments.

Enhancement of mixing by rodlike polymers.

We study the mixing of a passive scalar field dispersed in a solution of rodlike polymers in two dimensions, by means of numerical simulations of a rheological model for the polymer solution. The flow is driven by a parallel sinusoidal force (Kolmogorov flow). Although the Reynolds number is lower than the critical value for inertial instabilities, the rotational dynamics of the polymers generates a chaotic flow similar to the so-called elastic-turbulence regime observed in extensible polymer solutions. The temporal decay of the variance of the scalar field and its gradients shows that this chaotic flow strongly enhances mixing.

Emergence of chaos in a viscous solution of rods.

It is shown that the addition of small amounts of microscopic rods in a viscous fluid at low Reynolds number causes a significant increase of the flow resistance. Numerical simulations of the dynamics of the solution reveal that this phenomenon is associated to a transition from laminar to chaotic flow. Polymer stresses give rise to flow instabilities which, in turn, perturb the alignment of the rods. This coupled dynamics results in the activation of a wide range of scales, which enhances the mixing efficiency of viscous flows.