Electrohydrodynamically induced mixing in immiscible multilayer flows

Abstract

In the present study we investigate electrostatic stabilization mechanisms acting on stratified fluids. Electric fields have been shown to control and even suppress the Rayleigh-Taylor instability when a heavy fluid lies above lighter fluid. From a different perspective, similar techniques can also be used to generate interfacial dynamics in otherwise stable systems. We aim to identify active control protocols in confined geometries that induce time dependent flows in small scale devices without having moving parts. This effect has numerous applications, ranging from mixing phenomena to electric lithography. Two-dimensional computations are carried out and several such protocols are described. We present computational fluid dynamics videos with different underlying mixing strategies, which show promising results.