Epeiric Depositional Models for the Lower Cretaceous Washita Group North-Central Texas

UT Librarie

Viscoelastic Suppression of Gravity-Driven Counterflow Instability

Attempts to achieve "top kill" of actively flowing oil wells by insertion of dense drilling "muds", i.e., slurries of dense minerals, from above will fail if the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability in the gravity-driven counterflow produces turbulence that breaks up the denser fluid into small droplets. Here we estimate the droplet size to be sub-mm for fast flows and suggest the addition of a shear-thickening polymer to suppress turbulence. Laboratory experiments show a progression from droplet formation to complete turbulence suppression at the relevant high velocities, illustrating rich new physics accessible by using a shear-thickening liquid in gravity driven counter-streaming flows.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures, revised in response to referees' comment

Helical structures from an isotropic homopolymer model

We present Monte Carlo simulation results for square-well homopolymers at a series of bond lengths. Although the model contains only isotropic pairwise interactions, under appropriate conditions this system shows spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking, where the chain exists in either a left- or a right-handed helical structure. We investigate how this behavior depends upon the ratio between bond length and monomer radius.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication by Physical Review Letter