Intermittency and rough-pipe turbulence

Abstract

Recently, by analyzing the measurement data of Nikuradze, it has been proposed (N. Goldenfeld, Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf{96}}, 044503, 2006) that the friction factor, $f$, of rough pipe flow obeys a scaling law in the turbulent regime. Here, we provide a phenomenological scaling argument to explain this law and demonstrate how intermittency modifies the scaling form, thereby relating $f$ to the intermittency exponent, $\eta$. By statistically analyzing the measurement data of $f$, we infer a satisfactory estimate for $\eta$ ($\approx 0.02$), the inclusion of which is shown to improve the data-collapse curve. This provides empirical evidence for intermittency other than the direct measurement of velocity fluctuations.

To appear in Phys. Rev. E, Rapid Communications

References in corpus (4)

• Turbulent Friction in Rough Pipes and the Energy Spectrum of the Phenomenological Theory
• Unified Multifractal Description of Velocity Increments Statistics in Turbulence: Intermittency and Skewness
• Roughness-induced critical phenomena in a turbulent flow
• Rough-conduit flows and the existence of fully developed turbulence

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Turbulence as a problem in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics
• Macroscopic effects of the spectral structure in turbulent flows
• The friction factor of two-dimensional rough-boundary turbulent soap film flows
• Friction factor for turbulent flow in rough pipes from Heisenberg's closure hypothesis
• The stagnation point von Kármán coefficient
• Asymptotic turbulent friction in 2D rough-walled flows
• Drag reduction by polymer additives from turbulent spectra
• Superstatistics as the statistics of quasi-equilibrium states: Application to fully developed turbulence
• Roughness-induced critical phenomenon analogy for turbulent friction factor explained by a co-spectral budget model
• An extension of the momentum transfer model to time-dependent pipe turbulence