Novel Marangoni Flows

G.M. Homsy
Department of Mechanical & Environmental Engineering
University of California, Santa Barbara

In this talk I will describe three recent studies of novel Marangoni flows, i.e. flows that are driven by tangential stresses that are produced by temperature, compositional, or electrical fields. The first two of these are flows driven or modified by the non-uniform in-situ production of surfactants by chemical reactions. Such surfactant gradients give rise to surface tension gradients which drive bulk flows. We study experimentally the effect of such reactions on viscous fingering in the tip-splitting regime, finding that Marangoni stresses result in wider fingers and a suppression of the tip-splitting instability. We then describe an amazing phenomena of spontaneous, self-sustained chemically driven oscillations at the tip of a drop suspended from the tip of a needle and connect this phenomena to the well-known tip-streaming in extensional flow near drops. Finally, we describe theory and experiment on the manipulation of tangential electrical stresses to drive chaotic advection in translating drops of dielectric liquids.