The chaotic rotation of elongated particles in anoscillating Couette ow

Abstract: Flows with suspended particles occur in a large range of engineering applicationsand biological systems. A fundamental understanding of the uidparticlecoupling can be obtained by analyzing single particles in simple ow situations. Nilsen and Anderson (2013) studied the dynamics of a prolatespheroid rotating in the ow-gradient plane of an oscillating creepingshear ow. They found that given a high enough particle inertia the rotationcould become chaotic. This thesis extends on this work by taking uid inertia into account and studying the rotation of an elliptical cylinder.Numerical simulations with the Lattice Boltzmann EBF method reveal alarge variety of rotational states. Further, chaotic solutions are identiedwith a new Lyapunov exponent based algorithm. These chaotic solutionsare found to be present for heavy particles (compared to the uid) and smalloscillation frequencies (compared to the shear rate in the channel).