  It is well-known that stable and unstable manifolds strongly influence fluid
motion in unsteady flows. These emanate from hyperbolic trajectories, with the
structures moving nonautonomously in time. The local directions of emanation at
each instance in time is the focus of this article. Within a nearly autonomous
setting, it is shown that these time-varying directions can be characterised
through the accumulated effect of velocity shear. Connections to Oseledets
spaces and projection operators in exponential dichotomies are established.
Availability of data for both infinite and finite time-intervals is considered.
With microfluidic flow control in mind, a methodology for manipulating these
directions in any prescribed time-varying fashion by applying a local velocity
shear is developed. The results are verified for both smoothly and
discontinuously time-varying directions using finite-time Lyapunov exponent
fields, and excellent agreement is obtained.
