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Article
Low Mach Number Fluctuating Hydrodynamics of Multispecies Liquid Mixtures
Physics of Fluids (2015)
  • Aleksandar Donev, New York University
  • Andy J. Nonaka, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
  • Amit K. Bhattacharjee, New York University
  • Alejandro Garcia, San Jose State University
  • John B. Bell, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Abstract
We develop a low Mach number formulation of the hydrodynamic equations describing transport of mass and momentum in a multispecies mixture of incompressible miscible liquids at specified temperature and pressure, which generalizes our prior work on ideal mixtures of ideal gases [Balakrishnan et al., “Fluctuating hydrodynamics of multispecies nonreactive mixtures,” Phys. Rev. E 89 013017 (2014)] and binary liquid mixtures [Donev et al., “Low mach number fluctuating hydrodynamics of diffusively mixing fluids,” Commun. Appl. Math. Comput. Sci. 9(1), 47-105 (2014)]. In this formulation, we combine and extend a number of existing descriptions of multispecies transport available in the literature. The formulation applies to non-ideal mixtures of arbitrary number of species, without the need to single out a “solvent” species, and includes contributions to the diffusive mass flux due to gradients of composition, temperature, and pressure. Momentum transport and advective mass transport are handled using a low Mach number approach that eliminates fast sound waves (pressure fluctuations) from the full compressible system of equations and leads to a quasi-incompressible formulation. Thermal fluctuations are included in our fluctuating hydrodynamics description following the principles of nonequilibrium thermodynamics. We extend the semi-implicit staggered-grid finite-volume numerical method developed in our prior work on binary liquid mixtures [Nonaka et al., “Low mach number fluctuating hydrodynamics of binary liquid mixtures,” arXiv:1410.2300 (2015)] and use it to study the development of giant nonequilibrium concentration fluctuations in a ternary mixture subjected to a steady concentration gradient. We also numerically study the development of diffusion-driven gravitational instabilities in a ternary mixture and compare our numerical results to recent experimental measurements [Carballido-Landeira et al., “Mixed-mode instability of a miscible interface due to coupling between Rayleigh–Taylor and double-diffusive convective modes,” Phys. Fluids 25, 024107 (2013)] in a Hele-Shaw cell. We find that giant nonequilibrium fluctuations can trigger the instability but are eventually dominated by the deterministic growth of the unstable mode, in both quasi-two-dimensional (Hele-Shaw) and fully three-dimensional geometries used in typical shadowgraph experiments.
Disciplines
Publication Date
2015
DOI
10.1063/1.4913571
Publisher Statement
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This article appeared in Physics of Fluids 27 037103 (2015) and may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4913571
Citation Information
Aleksandar Donev, Andy J. Nonaka, Amit K. Bhattacharjee, Alejandro Garcia, et al.. "Low Mach Number Fluctuating Hydrodynamics of Multispecies Liquid Mixtures" Physics of Fluids Vol. 27 Iss. 3 (2015) ISSN: 1070-6631
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/alejandro_garcia1/98/