paper

Strong polymer-turbulence interactions in viscoelastic turbulent channel flow

arXiv:1003.5331 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevE.82.066303

Abstract

This paper is focused on the fundamental mechanism(s) of viscoelastic turbulence that lead to polymer induced turbulent drag reduction phenomenon. A great challenge in this problem is the computation of viscoelastic turbulent flows, since the understanding of polymer physics is restricted to mechanical models. An effective state-of-the-art numerical method to solve the governing equation for polymers modelled as non-linear springs, without using any artificial assumptions as usual, was implemented here for the first time on a three-dimensional channel flow geometry. The capability of this algorithm to capture the strong polymer-turbulence dynamical interactions is depicted on the results, which are much closer qualitatively to experimental observations. This allowed a more detailed study of the polymer-turbulence interactions, which yields an enhanced picture on a mechanism resulting from the polymer-turbulence energy transfers.

21 pages, 16 figures, corrected typos and minor content changes for clarification, accepted for publication in Physical Review E

References in corpus (2)

Cited by in corpus (12)