Electrohydrodynamics of deflated vesicles: budding, rheology and pairwise interactions

Abstract

The electrohydrodynamics of vesicle suspensions is characterized by studying their pairwise interactions in applied DC electric fields in two dimensions. In the dilute limit, the rheology of the suspension is shown to vary nonlinearly with the electric conductivity ratio of the interior and exterior fluids. The prolate-oblate-prolate transition and other transitionary dynamics observed in experiments and previously confirmed via numerical simulations is further investigated here for smaller reduced areas. When two vesicles are initially un-aligned with the external electric field, three different responses are observed when the key parameters are varied: (i) chain formation--they self-assemble to form a chain that is aligned along the field direction, (ii) circulatory motion--they rotate about each other, (iii) oscillatory motion--they form a chain but oscillate about each other.