No Arabic abstract
Harmonic oscillations of the walls of a turbulent plane channel flow are studied by direct numerical simulations to improve our understanding of the physical mechanism for skin-friction drag reduction. The simulations are carried out at constant pressure gradient in order to define an unambiguous inner scaling: in this case, drag reduction manifests itself as an increase of mass flow rate. Energy and enstrophy balances, carried out to emphasize the role of the oscillating spanwise shear layer, show that the viscous dissipations of the mean flow and of the turbulent fluctuations increase with the mass flow rate, and the relative importance of the latter decreases. We then focus on the turbulent enstrophy: through an analysis of the temporal evolution from the beginning of the wall motion, the dominant, oscillation-related term in the turbulent enstrophy is shown to cause the turbulent dissipation to be enhanced in absolute terms, before the slow drift towards the new quasi-equilibrium condition. This mechanism is found to be responsible for the increase in mass flow rate. We finally show that the time-average volume integral of the dominant term relates linearly to the drag reduction.
We study single-phase and particulate turbulent channel flows, bounded by two incompressible hyper-elastic walls. Different wall elasticities are considered with and without a 10% volume fraction of finite-size rigid spherical particles, while elastic walls are modelled as a neo-Hookean material. We report a significant drag increase and an enhancement of the turbulence activity with growing wall elasticity for both single-phase and particulate cases in comparison with the single-phase flow over rigid walls. A drag reduction and a turbulence attenuation is obtained for the particulate cases with highly elastic walls, albeit with respect to the single-phase flow of the same wall elasticity; whereas, an opposite effect of the particles is observed on the flow of the less elastic walls. This is explained by investigating the near-wall turbulence of highly elastic walls, where the strong asymmetry in the magnitude of wall-normal velocity fluctuations (favouring the positive), is found to push the particles towards the channel centre. The particle layer close to the wall is shown to contribute to the turbulence production by increasing the wall-normal velocity fluctuations, while in the absence of this layer, smaller wall deformation and in turn a turbulence attenuation is observed. We further address the effect of the volume fraction at a moderate wall elasticity, by increasing the particle volume fraction up to 20%. Migration of the particles from the interface region is found to be the cause of a further turbulence attenuation, in comparison to the same volume fraction in the case of rigid walls. However, the particle induced stress compensates for the loss of the Reynolds shear stress, thus, resulting in a higher overall drag for the case with elastic walls. The effect of wall-elasticity on the drag is reported to reduce significantly with increasing volume fraction of particles.
Local dissipation scales are a manifestation of the intermittent small-scale nature of turbulence. We report the first experimental evaluation of the distribution of local dissipation scales in turbulent pipe flows for a range of Reynolds numbers, 2.4x10^4<=Re_D<=7.0x10^4. Our measurements at the nearly isotropic pipe centerline and within the anisotropic logarithmic layer show excellent agreement with distributions that were previously calculated from numerical simulations of homogeneous isotropic box turbulence and with those predicted by theory. The reported results suggest a universality of the smallest-scale fluctuations around the classical Kolmogorov dissipation length.
We present direct numerical simulations of turbulent channel flow with passive Lagrangian polymers. To understand the polymer behavior we investigate the behavior of infinitesimal line elements and calculate the probability distribution function (PDF) of finite-time Lyapunov exponents and from them the corresponding Cramers function for the channel flow. We study the statistics of polymer elongation for both the Oldroyd-B model (for Weissenberg number $Wi <1$) and the FENE model. We use the location of the minima of the Cramers function to define the Weissenberg number precisely such that we observe coil-stretch transition at $Wiapprox1$. We find agreement with earlier analytical predictions for PDF of polymer extensions made by Balkovsky, Fouxon and Lebedev [Phys. Rev. Lett., 84, 4765 (2000).] for linear polymers (Oldroyd-B model) with $Wi<1$ and by Chertkov [Phys. Rev. Lett., 84, 4761 (2000).] for nonlinear FENE-P model of polymers. For $Wi>1$ (FENE model) the polymer are significantly more stretched near the wall than at the center of the channel where the flow is closer to homogenous isotropic turbulence. Furthermore near the wall the polymers show a strong tendency to orient along the stream-wise direction of the flow but near the centerline the statistics of orientation of the polymers is consistent with analogous results obtained recently in homogeneous and isotropic flows.
We experimentally characterize the fluctuations of the non-homogeneous non-isotropic turbulence in an axisymmetric von Karman flow. We show that these fluctuations satisfy relations analogous to classical Fluctuation-Dissipation Relations (FDRs) in statistical mechanics. We use these relations to measure statistical temperatures of turbulence. The values of these temperatures are found to be dependent on the considered observable as already evidenced in other far from equilibrium systems.
Turbulence modeling is a classical approach to address the multiscale nature of fluid turbulence. Instead of resolving all scales of motion, which is currently mathematically and numerically intractable, reduced models that capture the large-scale behavior are derived. One of the most popular reduced models is the Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations. The goal is to solve the RANS equations for the mean velocity and pressure field. However, the RANS equations contain a term called the Reynolds stress tensor, which is not known in terms of the mean velocity field. Many RANS turbulence models have been proposed to model the Reynolds stress tensor in terms of the mean velocity field, but are usually not suitably general for all flow fields of interest. Data-driven turbulence models have recently garnered considerable attention and have been rapidly developed. In a seminal work, Ling et al (2016) developed the tensor basis neural network (TBNN), which was used to learn a general Galilean invariant model for the Reynolds stress tensor. The TBNN was applied to a variety of flow fields with encouraging results. In the present study, the TBNN is applied to the turbulent channel flow. Its performance is compared with classical turbulence models as well as a neural network model that does not preserve Galilean invariance. A sensitivity study on the TBNN reveals that the network attempts to adjust to the dataset, but is limited by the mathematical form that guarantees Galilean invariance.