Polymer turbulence with Reynolds and Riemann
Models of flowing complex fluids such as polymer solutions often use a conformation tensor that reflects the state of the fluid microstructure. In polymer solutions, this quantity measures the orientation and stretching of the molecules, and reflects the fact that the squared length of a polymer molecule must be positive. By exploiting results from differential geometry and continuum mechanics, Hameduddin et al. (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 842, 2018, pp. 395–427) introduce a new approach for analysing the conformation tensor that respects this positivity constraint. With this approach, they present computational results for turbulent flow of a polymer solution that exhibits turbulent drag reduction, showing that the new measures of polymer stretching afforded by their approach lend insights not available in traditional methods.