| Issue |
EPL
Volume 132, Number 4, November 2020
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Article Number | 44003 | |
| Number of page(s) | 7 | |
| Section | Electromagnetism, Optics, Acoustics, Heat Transfer, Classical Mechanics, and Fluid Dynamics | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1209/0295-5075/132/44003 | |
| Published online | 28 December 2020 | |
Cascade or not cascade? Energy transfer and elastic effects in active nematics
1 Dipartimento di Fisica, Università degli Studi di Bari and INFN, Sezione di Bari - Via Amendola 173, Bari, I-70126, Italy
2 Dipartimento di Fisica and INFN, Università di Roma Tor Vergata - Via Ricerca Scientifica 1, I-00133 Roma, Italy
Received: 6 July 2020
Accepted: 4 November 2020
We numerically study the multi-scale properties of a 2d active gel to address the energy transfer mechanism. We find that activity is able to excite long-ranged distortions of the nematic pattern giving rise to spontaneous laminar flows and to a chaotic regime by further increasing the rate of active energy injection. By means of a scale-to-scale spectral analysis we find that the gel is basically driven by the local balancing between active injection and viscous dissipation, without any signal of non-linear hydrodynamical transfer and turbulent cascades. Furthermore, elasticity may qualitatively play an important role by transferring energy from small to larger scales through nemato-hydrodynamic interactions.
PACS: 47.57.Lj – Flows of liquid crystals / 47.63.mf – Low-Reynolds-number motions / 83.80.Kn – Physical gels and microgels
© 2020 EPLA
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