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Nowadays, wormlike micellar solutions are extensively used as thickener in home care and personal care products. This and other successful applications, together with their unique rheology and flow properties, explain the growing attention that both and applied research are devoting to these systems.
In spite of this effort, there are still many open questions, mainly concerning the flow instabilities shown by these systems at high shear rates (such as shear banding), with the possibility of appearance of flow induced structures.
In this scenario, microfluidics is a powerful tool to get a deeper insight into the flow behavior of a wormlike micellar solution. Indeed, thanks to the high confinement of a microfluidic device, the flowing solution easily shows flow instabilities, which can easily be visualized, by coupling the device with optical microscopy, thus ensuring a direct visualization of any structing phenomena.
Here, we study couple the microfluidic device with tracking techniques to study the flow of a widely used wormlike micellar solution through a glass capillary, and the onset of flow-induced structures has been related to the evolution of the velocity profiles of the solution.
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