Disorder Suppresses Chaos in Viscoelastic Flows

Viscoelastic flows through microstructured geometries transition from steady to time dependent and chaotic dynamics under critical flow conditions. However, the implications of geometric disorder for flow stability are unknown. We measure the onset of spatiotemporal velocity fluctuations for a viscoelastic flow through microfluidic pillar arrays, having controlled variations of geometric disorder. Introducing a small perturbation into the pillar array (∼10% of the lattice constant) delays the onset of the instability to higher flow speed, and yet larger disorders (≥25%) suppress the transition to chaos. We show that disorder introduces preferential flow paths that promote shear over extensional deformation and enhance flow stability by locally reducing polymer stretching.