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Abstract:
Cavitation, the nucleation of vapour in liquids, is ubiquitous in fluid dynamics, and is often
implicated in a myriad of industrial and biomedical applications. Although extensively studied
in isotropic liquids, corresponding investigations in anisotropic liquids are largely lacking.
Here, by combining liquid crystal microfluidic experiments, nonequilibrium molecular
dynamics simulations and theoretical arguments, we report flow-induced cavitation in an
anisotropic fluid. The cavitation domain nucleates due to sudden pressure drop upon flow
past a cylindrical obstacle within a microchannel. For an anisotropic fluid, the inception and
growth of the cavitation domain ensued in the Stokes regime, while no cavitation
was observed in isotropic liquids flowing under similar hydrodynamic parameters. Using
simulations we identify a critical value of the Reynolds number for cavitation inception that
scales inversely with the order parameter of the fluid. Strikingly, the critical Reynolds number
for anisotropic fluids can be 50% lower than that of isotropic fluids.
