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Turbulent Suppression Of Spinodal Decomposition, D. J. Pine, Nalini Easwar, James V. Maher, W. I. Goldburg

Physics: Faculty Publications

Light scattering experiments reveal a strong suppression of phase separation near the critical point of a vigorously stirred binary liquid mixture. For stirring Reynolds numbers R ranging from 6.0 × 10³ to 4.5 × 10³, the apparent critical temperature is depressed by ∼1 mK to ∼50 mK. This temperature depression ΔT_c can be fitted to a power law ΔT_c∼Rλ where λ∼2. The magnitude of ΔT_c is consistent with simple models which attribute the effect to the suppression of composition fluctuations by shear; however, these models predict λ≃0.80 in contrast to the observed value …