Paper detail

Viscoelastic surface instabilities

We review three different types of viscoelastic surface instabilities: The Rayleigh -- Plateau, the Saffman -- Taylor and the Faraday instability. These instabilities are classical examples of hydrodynamic surface instabilities. The addition of a small amount of polymers to pure water can alter its flow behavior drastically and the type of instability may change not only quantitatively but also qualitatively. We will show that some of the observed new phenomena can be explained by the use of simple rheological models that contain most of the underlying physical mechanisms leading to the instability. A quantitative description however is often only possible close to the onset of the instability or for weak deviations from Newtonian behavior. A complete theoretical description is still lacking when the system is driven far from equilibrium or for fluids with strong non-Newtonian behavior.