Shadowgraph Analysis of Non-equilibrium Fluctuations for Measuring Transport Properties in Microgravity in the GRADFLEX Experiment

Abstract

In a fluid system driven out of equilibrium by the presence of a gradient, fluctuations become long-ranged and their intensity diverges at large spatial scales. This divergence is prevented by vertical confinement and, in a stable configuration, by gravity. Gravity and confinement also affect the dynamics of non-equilibrium fluctuations (NEFs). In fact, small wavelength fluctuations decay diffusively, while the decay of long wavelength ones is either dominated by buoyancy or by confinement. In normal gravity, from the analysis of the dynamics one can extract the diffusion coefficients as well as other transport properties. For example, in a thermodiffusion experiment one can measure the Soret coefficient. Under microgravity, the relaxation of fluctuations occurs by diffusion only and this prevents the determination of the Soret coefficient of a binary mixture from the study of the dynamics. In this work we propose an …

Roberto Cerbino

Professor of Experimental Soft Matter Physics

My research interests include Soft matter physics, living matter, cell biophysics and quantitative microscopy.