Screened and unscreened phases in sedimenting suspensions

Levine, Alex and Ramaswamy, Sriram and Frey, Erwin and Bruinsma, Robijn (1998) Screened and unscreened phases in sedimenting suspensions. In: Physical Review Letters, 81 (26). pp. 5944-5947.

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Abstract

A coarse-grained stochastic hydrodynamical description of velocity and concentration fluctuations in steadily sedimenting suspensions is constructed and analyzed using self-consistent and renormalization-group methods. We find a nonequilibrium phase transition from an "unscreened" phase in which we recover the Caflisch-Luke [Phys. Fluids 28, 759 (1985)] divergence of the velocity variance to a "screened" phase where the fluctuations have a finite correlation length depending on the volume fraction phi as phi(-1/3), in agreement with Segre et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 79, 2574 (1997)] (if their observation of a phi-independent diffusivity is used), and the velocity variance is independent of system size.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Publication:	Physical Review Letters
Publisher:	American Physical Society
Additional Information:	Copyright of this article belongs to American Physical Society.
Department/Centre:	Division of Physical & Mathematical Sciences > Physics
Date Deposited:	30 Dec 2009 07:28
Last Modified:	19 Sep 2010 05:27
URI:	http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/19216

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