Weakly Nonlinear Analysis of Electroconvection in a Suspended Fluid Film

We have measured the stability boundary for steady electrically-driven convective flow in thin, freely suspended films of Smectic-A liquid crystal. The thinness and layered structure of the films supress two- and three-dimensional instabilities of the convection pattern. As the voltage applied across the film, or the length of the film, is varied, convective vortices are created or destroyed to keep the wave number of the pattern within a stable range. The range of stable wav...

Electrohydrodynamic instabilities of fluid-fluid interfaces can be exploited in various microfluidic applications in order to enhance mixing, replicate well-controlled patterns or generate drops of a particular size. In this work, we study the stability and dynamics of a system of three superimposed layers of two immiscible fluids subject to a normal electric field. Following the Taylor-Melcher leaky dielectric model, the bulk remains electroneutral while a net charge accumul...

We report on the effects of temporal modulation of the driving force on a particular class of localized states, known as worms, that have been observed in electroconvection in nematic liquid crystals. The worms consist of the superposition of traveling waves and have been observed to have unique, small widths, but to vary in length. The transition from the pure conduction state to worms occurs via a backward bifurcation. A possible explanation of the formation of the worms ha...

A general localization mechanism for waves in dissipative systems is identified that does not require the bistability of the basic state and the nonlinear plane-wave state. The mechanism explains the two-dimensional localized wave structures (`worms') that recently have been observed in experiments on electroconvection in nematic liquid crystals where the transition to extended waves is supercritical. The mechanism accounts for the propagation direction of the worms and certa...

We develop a characterization method of electroconvection structures in a planar nematic liquid crystal layer by a study of the electric current transport. Because the applied potential difference has a sinusoidal time dependence, we define two electric Nusselt numbers corresponding to the in-phase and out-of-phase components of the current. These Nusselt numbers are predicted theoretically using a weakly nonlinear analysis of the standard model. Our measurements of the elect...

We report experiments on convection driven by a radial electrical force in suspended annular smectic A liquid crystal films. In the absence of an externally imposed azimuthal shear, a stationary one-dimensional (1D) pattern consisting of symmetric vortex pairs is formed via a supercritical transition at the onset of convection. Shearing reduces the symmetries of the base state and produces a traveling 1D pattern whose basic periodic unit is a pair of asymmetric vortices. For ...

We consider a model of electroconvection motivated by studies of the motion of a two dimensional annular suspended smectic film under the influence of an electric potential maintained at the boundary by two cylindrical electrodes. We prove that this electroconvection model has global in time unique smooth solutions.

It is well known that electro-hydrodynamical effects in freely suspended liquid films can flow the liquid. Here we report a purely electrically driven rotation in water and some other liquid suspended films with full control on the velocity and the chirality of the rotating vortices. The device, which is called ``film motor'', consists of a quasi two-dimensional electrolysis cell in an external in-plane electric field, crossing the mean electrolysis current density. If either...

We analyze a solenoidal motion in a vertically vibrated freely suspended thin smectic film. We demonstrate analytically that transverse oscillations of the film generate two-dimensional vortices in the plane of the film owing to hydrodynamic nonlinearity. An explicit expression for the vorticity of the in-plane film motion in terms of the film displacement is obtained. The air around the film is proven to play a crucial role, since it changes the dispersion relation of transv...

We report the results of a complete modal and nonmodal linear stability analysis of the electrohydrodynamic flow (EHD) for the problem of electroconvection in the strong injection region. Convective cells are formed by Coulomb force in an insulating liquid residing between two plane electrodes subject to unipolar injection. Besides pure electroconvection, we also consider the case where a cross-flow is present, generated by a streamwise pressure gradient, in the form of a lam...