In order to understand the flow profiles of complex fluids, a crucial issue concerns the emergence of spatial correlations among plastic rearrangements exhibiting cooperativity flow behaviour at the macroscopic level. In this paper, the rate of plastic events in a Poiseuille flow is experimentally measured on a confined foam in a Hele-Shaw geometry. The correlation with independently measured velocity profiles is quantified by looking at the relationship between the localisation length of the velocity profiles and the localisation length of the spatial distribution of plastic events.

We propose numerical simulations of viscoelastic fluids based on a hybrid algorithm combining Lattice-Boltzmann models (LBM) and Finite Differences (FD) schemes, the former used to model the macroscopic hydrodynamic equations, and the latter used to model the polymer dynamics. The kinetics of the polymers is introduced using constitutive equations for viscoelastic fluids with finitely extensible non-linear elastic dumbbells with Peterlin's closure (FENE-P).

A special feature of Rayleigh-Taylor systems with chemical reactions is the competition between turbulent mixing and the "burning processes", which leads to a highly non-trivial dynamics. We studied the problem performing high resolution numerical simulations of a 2d system, using a thermal lattice Boltzmann (LB) model.

A numerical study of turbulence seeded with light particles is presented. We analyze the statistical properties of coherent, small-scale structures by looking at the trapping events of light particles inside vortex filaments. We study the properties of particles attracting set, measuring its fractal dimension and the probability that the separation between two particles remains within the dissipative scale, even for time lapses as long as the large-scale correlation time, T(L).

We present the results of our numerical simulations of the Rayleigh-Taylor turbulence, performed using a recently proposed (Sbragaglia et al 2009 J. Fluid Mech. 628 299, Scagliarini et al 2010 Phys. Fluids 22 055101) lattice Boltzmann method that can describe consistently a thermal compressible flow subjected to an external forcing. The method allowed us to study the system in both the nearly Boussinesq regime and the strongly compressible regime. Moreover, we show that when the stratification is important, the presence of the adiabatic gradient causes the arrest of the mixing process.

We study the Couette flow of a quasi-2d soft-glassy material in a Hele-Shaw geometry. The material is chosen to be above the jamming point, where a yield stress sigma(Upsilon) emerges, below which the material deforms elastically and above which it flows like a complex fluid according to a Herschel-Bulkley (HB) rheology. Simultaneously, the effect of the confining plates is modelled as an effective linear friction law, while the walls aside the Hele-Shaw cell are sufficiently close to each other to allow visible cooperativity effects in the velocity profiles (Goyon et al., 2008).

In this paper we present an implementation for the QPACE supercomputer of a Lattice Boltzmann model of a fluid-dynamics flow in 2 dimensions. QPACE is a massively parallel application-driven system powered by the Cell processor. We review the structure of the model, describe in details its implementation on QPACE and finally present performance data and preliminary physics results. (C) 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

We compute the continuum thermohydrodynamical limit of a new formulation of lattice kinetic equations for thermal compressible flows, recently proposed by Sbragaglia [J. Fluid Mech. 628, 299 (2009)]. We show that the hydrodynamical manifold is given by the correct compressible Fourier-Navier-Stokes equations for a perfect fluid. We validate the numerical algorithm by means of exact results for transition to convection in Rayleigh-Beacutenard compressible systems and against direct comparison with finite-difference schemes.