No Arabic abstract
Emulsions are omnipresent in the food industry, health care, and chemical synthesis. In this Letter the dynamics of meta-stable oil-water emulsions in highly turbulent ($10^{11}leqtext{Ta}leq 3times 10^{13}$) Taylor--Couette flow, far from equilibrium, is investigated. By varying the oil-in-water void fraction, catastrophic phase inversion between oil-in-water and water-in-oil emulsions can be triggered, changing the morphology, including droplet sizes, and rheological properties of the mixture, dramatically. The manifestation of these different states is exemplified by combining global torque measurements and local in-situ laser induced fluorescence (LIF) microscopy imaging. Despite the turbulent state of the flow and the dynamic equilibrium of the oil-water mixture, the global torque response of the system is found to be as if the fluid were Newtonian, and the effective viscosity of the mixture was found to be several times bigger or smaller than either of its constituents.
We report on the modification of drag by neutrally buoyant spherical particles in highly turbulent Taylor-Couette flow. These particles can be used to disentangle the effects of size, deformability, and volume fraction on the drag, when contrasted with the drag for bubbly flows. We find that rigid spheres hardly change the drag of the system beyond the trivial viscosity effects caused by replacing the working fluid with particles. The size of the particle has a marginal effect on the drag, with smaller diameter particles showing only slightly lower drag. Increasing the particle volume fraction shows a net drag increase as the effective viscosity of the fluid is also increased. The increase in drag for increasing particle volume fraction is corroborated by performing laser Doppler anemometry where we find that the turbulent velocity fluctuations also increase with increasing volume fraction. In contrast with rigid spheres, for bubbles the effective drag reduction also increases with increasing Reynolds number. Bubbles are also much more effective in reducing the overall drag.
A new approach to turbulence simulation, based on a combination of large-eddy simulation (LES) for the whole flow and an array of non-space-filling quasi-direct numerical simulations (QDNS), which sample the response of near-wall turbulence to large-scale forcing, is proposed and evaluated. The technique overcomes some of the cost limitations of turbulence simulation, since the main flow is treated with a coarse-grid LES, with the equivalent of wall functions supplied by the near-wall sampled QDNS. Two cases are tested, at friction Reynolds number Re$_tau$=4200 and 20,000. The total grid node count for the first case is less than half a million and less than two million for the second case, with the calculations only requiring a desktop computer. A good agreement with published DNS is found at Re$_tau$=4200, both in terms of the mean velocity profile and the streamwise velocity fluctuation statistics, which correctly show a substantial increase in near-wall turbulence levels due to a modulation of near-wall streaks by large-scale structures. The trend continues at Re$_tau$=20,000, in agreement with experiment, which represents one of the major achievements of the new approach. A number of detailed aspects of the model, including numerical resolution, LES-QDNS coupling strategy and sub-grid model are explored. A low level of grid sensitivity is demonstrated for both the QDNS and LES aspects. Since the method does not assume a law of the wall, it can in principle be applied to flows that are out of equilibrium.
Air cavities, i.e. air layers developed behind cavitators, are seen as a promising drag reducing method in the maritime industry. Here we utilize the Taylor-Couette (TC) geometry, i.e. the flow between two concentric, independently rotating cylinders, to study the effect of air cavities in this closed setup, which is well-accessible for drag measurements and optical flow visualizations. We show that stable air cavities can be formed, and that the cavity size increases with Reynolds number and void fraction. The streamwise cavity length strongly depends on the axial position due to buoyancy forces acting on the air. Strong secondary flows, which are introduced by a counter-rotating outer cylinder, clearly decrease the stability of the cavities, as air is captured in the Taylor rolls rather than in the cavity. Surprisingly, we observed that local air injection is not necessary to sustain the air cavities; as long as air is present in the system it is found to be captured in the cavity. We show that the drag is decreased significantly as compared to the case without air, but with the geometric modifications imposed on the TC system by the cavitators. As the void fraction increases, the drag of the system is decreased. However, the cavitators itself significantly increase the drag due to their hydrodynamic resistance (pressure drag): In fact, a net drag increase is found when compared to the standard smooth-wall TC case. Therefore, one must first overcome the added drag created by the cavitators before one obtains a net drag reduction.
Recent studies have brought into question the view that at sufficiently high Reynolds number turbulence is an asymptotic state. We present the first direct observation of the decay of turbulent states in Taylor-Couette flow with lifetimes spanning five orders of magnitude. We also show that there is a regime where Taylor-Couette flow shares many of the decay characteristics observed in other shear flows, including Poisson statistics and the coexistence of laminar and turbulent patches. Our data suggest that characteristic decay times increase super-exponentially with increasing Reynolds number but remain bounded in agreement with the most recent data from pipe flow and with a recent theoretical model. This suggests that, contrary to the prevailing view, turbulence in linearly stable shear flows may be generically transient.
In this study, we combine experiments and direct numerical simulations to investigate the effects of the height of transverse ribs at the walls on both global and local flow properties in turbulent Taylor-Couette flow. We create rib roughness by attaching up to 6 axial obstacles to the surfaces of the cylinders over an extensive range of rib heights, up to blockages of 25% of the gap width. In the asymptotic ultimate regime, where the transport is independent of viscosity, we emperically find that the prefactor of the $Nu_{omega} propto Ta^{1/2}$ scaling (corresponding to the drag coefficient $C_f(Re)$ being constant) scales with the number of ribs $N_r$ and by the rib height $h^{1.71}$. The physical mechanism behind this is that the dominant contribution to the torque originates from the pressure forces acting on the rib which scale with rib height. The measured scaling relation of $N_r h^{1.71}$ is slightly smaller than the expected $N_r h^2$ scaling, presumably because the ribs cannot be regarded as completely isolated but interact. In the counter-rotating regime with smooth walls, the momentum transport is increased by turbulent Taylor vortices. We find that also in the presence of transverse ribs these vortices persist. In the counter-rotating regime, even for large roughness heights, the momentum transport is enhanced by these vortices.