Wave celerity on a shear-thinning fluid film flowing down an incline

Séverine Millet (1) , Valéry Botton (1) , François Rousset (2) , Hamda Ben Hadid (1)

1 LMFA - Laboratoire de Mecanique des Fluides et d'Acoustique
2 CETHIL - Centre de Thermique de Lyon

This letter presents a phenomenological model predicting the celerity of long surface waves on a non-Newtonian fluid flowing down an inclined plane. We show that, for a shear-thinning fluid, the celerity is greater than the well-known value c = 2U0. The developed model points at the significant effect of the viscosity disturbance and also provides a likely explanation for the decrease in threshold for the instability.

Domaines: Mécanique des fluides [physics.class-ph]; Mécanique des fluides [physics.class-ph]

Séverine Millet, Valéry Botton, François Rousset, Hamda Ben Hadid. Wave celerity on a shear-thinning fluid film flowing down an incline. Physics of Fluids, 2008, 20 (3), pp.031701. ⟨10.1063/1.2889140⟩. ⟨hal-00444988⟩