Thin film extensional flow of a transversely isotropic viscous fluid

Many biological materials such as cervical mucus and collagen gel possess a fibrous micro-structure. This micro-structure affects the emergent mechanical properties of the material, and hence the functional behaviour of the system. We consider the canonical problem of stretching a thin sheet of transversely-isotropic viscous fluid as a simplified version of the spinnbarkeit test for cervical mucus.

We propose a novel solution to the model constructed by Green & Friedman by manipulating the model to a form amenable to arbitrary Lagrangian--Eulerian (ALE) techniques. The system of equations, reduced by exploiting the slender nature of the sheet, is solved numerically and we discover that the bulk properties of the sheet are controlled by an effective viscosity dependent on the evolving angle of the fibres. In addition, we confirm a previous conjecture by demonstrating that the centre-line of the sheet need not be flat, and perform a short timescale analysis to capture the full behaviour of the centre-line.