English
 
Help Privacy Policy Disclaimer
  Advanced SearchBrowse
  1. View item / 
  2. Item Summary

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT
Add to Basket
  Local TagsRelease HistoryDetailsSummary

Released
Journal Article

Towards active microfluidics: Interface turbulence in thin liquid films with floating molecular machines

MPS-Authors
/persons/resource/persons21299

Alonso,  Sergio
Physical Chemistry, Fritz Haber Institute, Max Planck Society;

/persons/resource/persons21881

Mikhailov,  Alexander S.
Physical Chemistry, Fritz Haber Institute, Max Planck Society;

External Resource
No external resources are shared
Fulltext (restricted access)
There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.
Fulltext (public)

380120.pdf
(Preprint), 575KB

Supplementary Material (public)
There is no public supplementary material available
Citation

Alonso, S., & Mikhailov, A. S. (2009). Towards active microfluidics: Interface turbulence in thin liquid films with floating molecular machines. Physical Review E, 79(6): 061906. doi:10.1103/PhysRevE.79.061906.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-0010-F8F6-D
Abstract
Thin liquid films with floating active protein machines are considered. Cyclic mechanical motions within the machines, representing microscopic swimmers, lead to molecular propulsion forces applied to the air-liquid interface. We show that when the rate of energy supply to the machines exceeds a threshold, the flat interface becomes linearly unstable. As a result of this instability, the regime of interface turbulence, characterized by irregular traveling waves and propagating machine clusters, is established. Numerical investigations of this nonlinear regime are performed. Conditions for the experimental observation of the instability are discussed.