scholarly journals On the transient nature of localized pipe flow turbulence

2010 ◽  
Vol 646 ◽  
pp. 127-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARC AVILA ◽  
ASHLEY P. WILLIS ◽  
BJÖRN HOF

The onset of shear flow turbulence is characterized by turbulent patches bounded by regions of laminar flow. At low Reynolds numbers localized turbulence relaminarizes, raising the question of whether it is transient in nature or becomes sustained at a critical threshold. We present extensive numerical simulations and a detailed statistical analysis of the lifetime data, in order to shed light on the sources of the discrepancies present in the literature. The results are in excellent quantitative agreement with recent experiments and show that turbulent lifetimes increase super-exponentially with Reynolds number. In addition, we provide evidence for a lower bound below which there are no meta-stable characteristics of the transients, i.e. the relaminarization process is no longer memoryless.

2019 ◽  
Vol 874 ◽  
pp. 699-719 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jose M. Lopez ◽  
George H. Choueiri ◽  
Björn Hof

Polymer additives can substantially reduce the drag of turbulent flows and the upper limit, the so-called state of ‘maximum drag reduction’ (MDR), is to a good approximation independent of the type of polymer and solvent used. Until recently, the consensus was that, in this limit, flows are in a marginal state where only a minimal level of turbulence activity persists. Observations in direct numerical simulations at low Reynolds numbers ($Re$) using minimal sized channels appeared to support this view and reported long ‘hibernation’ periods where turbulence is marginalized. In simulations of pipe flow at $Re$ near transition we find that, indeed, with increasing Weissenberg number ($Wi$), turbulence expresses long periods of hibernation if the domain size is small. However, with increasing pipe length, the temporal hibernation continuously alters to spatio-temporal intermittency and here the flow consists of turbulent puffs surrounded by laminar flow. Moreover, upon an increase in $Wi$, the flow fully relaminarizes, in agreement with recent experiments. At even larger $Wi$, a different instability is encountered causing a drag increase towards MDR. Our findings hence link earlier minimal flow unit simulations with recent experiments and confirm that the addition of polymers initially suppresses Newtonian turbulence and leads to a reverse transition. The MDR state on the other hand results at these low$Re$ from a separate instability and the underlying dynamics corresponds to the recently proposed state of elasto-inertial turbulence.


1975 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
I. Wygnanski ◽  
M. Sokolov ◽  
D. Friedman

Conditionally sampled hot-wire measurements were taken in a pipe at low Reynolds numbers (2700 > Re > 2000) corresponding to the onset of turbulence as a result of a large perturbation in the flow. This type of transition gives rise to a turbulent puff which maintains itself indefinitely at around Re = 2200. The structure of puffs was investigated in some detail and was found to be very different from the structure of fully developed turbulent pipe flow. Nevertheless, it is independent of the character of the disturbance which created it. The purpose of the study was to gain some insight into the mechanism of transition in a pipe.


Author(s):  
Isabella M. Gavarini ◽  
Alessandro Bottaro ◽  
Frans T. M. Nieuwstadt

Transition in a cylindrical pipe flow still eludes thorough understanding. Most recent advances are based on the concept of transient growth of disturbances, but even this scenario is not fully confirmed by DNS and/or experiments. Based on the fact that even the most carefully conducted experiment is biased by uncertainties, we explore the spatial growth of disturbances developing on top of an almost ideal, axially invariant Poiseuille flow. The optimal deviation of the base flow from the ideal parabolic profile is computed by a variational tecnique, and unstable modes, driven by an inviscid mechanism, are found to exist for very small values of the norm of the deviation, at low Reynolds numbers.


2008 ◽  
Vol 599 ◽  
pp. 405-440 ◽  
Author(s):  
PATRICE MEUNIER ◽  
CHRISTOPHE ELOY ◽  
ROMAIN LAGRANGE ◽  
FRANÇOIS NADAL

In this paper, we report experimental and theoretical results on the flow inside a precessing and rotating cylinder. Particle image velocimetry measurements have revealed the instantaneous structure of the flow and confirmed that it is the sum of forced inertial (Kelvin) modes, as predicted by the classical linear inviscid theory. But this theory predicts also that the amplitude of a mode diverges when its natural frequency equals the precession frequency. A viscous and weakly nonlinear theory has therefore been developed at the resonance. This theory has been compared to experimental results and shows a good quantitative agreement. For low Reynolds numbers, the mode amplitude scales as the square root of the Reynolds number owing to the presence of Ekman layers on the cylinder walls. When the Reynolds number is increased, the amplitude saturates at a value which scales as the precession angle to the power one-third for a given resonance. The nonlinear theory also predicts the forcing of a geostrophic (axisymmetric) mode which has been observed and measured in the experiments. These results allow the flow inside a precessing cylinder to be fully characterized in all regimes as long as there is no instability.


2013 ◽  
Vol 737 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Deguchi ◽  
A. G. Walton

AbstractA numerically exact full Navier–Stokes counterpart of the asymptotic nonlinear solution in Hagen–Poiseuille flow proposed by Smith & Bodonyi (Proc. R. Soc. A, vol. 384, 1982, pp. 463–489) is discovered. The solution takes the form of a spiral travelling wave, with a novel feature being a strong induced component of swirl. Our solution shows excellent quantitative agreement with the asymptotic theory at Reynolds numbers of the order of $1{0}^{8} $.


2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 5-10
Author(s):  
Dmitriy Nazarov ◽  
Alexandr Pavlenko ◽  
Boris Zanin

The flow around the ekranoplan model was experimentally investigated in subsonic wind tunnel at low Reynolds numbers with a low level of flow turbulence. The method of carbon-oil visualization of surface streamlines was used in the experiments to obtain the flow pattern on the surface of the model. Different areas of separation and vortex structures on the fuselage and wing were discovered. The effect of varying of the attack angle on the flow pattern was demonstrated.


2015 ◽  
Vol 771 ◽  
pp. 743-777 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Chan ◽  
M. MacDonald ◽  
D. Chung ◽  
N. Hutchins ◽  
A. Ooi

Direct numerical simulations (DNS) are conducted for turbulent flow through pipes with three-dimensional sinusoidal roughnesses explicitly represented by body-conforming grids. The same viscous-scaled roughness geometry is first simulated at a range of different Reynolds numbers to investigate the effects of low Reynolds numbers and low $R_{0}/h$, where $R_{0}$ is the pipe radius and $h$ is the roughness height. Results for the present class of surfaces show that the Hama roughness function ${\rm\Delta}U^{+}$ is only marginally affected by low Reynolds numbers (or low $R_{0}/h$), and observations of outer-layer similarity (or lack thereof) show no signs of sensitivity to Reynolds number. Then, building on this, a systematic approach is taken to isolate the effects of roughness height $h^{+}$ and wavelength ${\it\lambda}^{+}$ in a turbulent wall-bounded flow in both transitionally rough and fully rough regimes. Current findings show that while the effective slope $\mathit{ES}$ (which for the present sinusoidal surfaces is proportional to $h^{+}/{\it\lambda}^{+}$) is an important roughness parameter, the roughness function ${\rm\Delta}U^{+}$ must also depend on some measure of the viscous roughness height. A simplistic linear–log fit clearly illustrates the strong correlation between ${\rm\Delta}U^{+}$ and both the roughness average height $k_{a}^{+}$ (which is related to $h^{+}$) and $\mathit{ES}$ for the surfaces simulated here, consistent with published literature. Various definitions of the virtual origin for rough-wall turbulent pipe flow are investigated and, for the surfaces simulated here, the hydraulic radius of the pipe appears to be the most suitable parameter, and indeed is the only virtual origin that can ever lead to collapse in the total stress. First- and second-order statistics are also analysed and collapses in the outer layer are observed for all cases, including those where the largest roughness height is a substantial proportion of the reference radius (low $R_{0}/h$). These results provide evidence that turbulent pipe flow over the present sinusoidal surfaces adheres to Townsend’s notion of outer-layer similarity, which pertains to statistics of relative motion.


2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (10) ◽  
pp. 103605 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guang Yin ◽  
Muk Chen Ong

Author(s):  
Fernando Mellibovsky ◽  
Alvaro Meseguer

This study provides a numerical characterization of the basin of attraction of the laminar Hagen–Poiseuille flow by measuring the minimal amplitude of a perturbation required to trigger transition. For pressure-driven pipe flow, the analysis presented here covers autonomous and impulsive scenarios where either the flow is perturbed with an initial disturbance with a well-defined norm or perturbed by means of local impulsive forcing that mimics injections through the pipe wall. In both the cases, the exploration is carried out for a wide range of Reynolds numbers by means of a computational method that numerically resolves the transitional dynamics. For , the present work provides critical amplitudes that decay as Re −3/2 and Re −1 for the autonomous and impulsive scenarios, respectively. For Re =2875, accurate threshold amplitudes are found for constant mass-flux pipe by means of a shooting method that provides critical trajectories that never relaminarize or trigger transition. These transient states are used as initial guesses in a damped Newton–Krylov method formulated to find periodic travelling wave solutions that either travel downstream or exhibit a helicoidal advection.


2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (suppl. 1) ◽  
pp. 93-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kwonyul Song ◽  
Jovan Jovanovic ◽  
Ahmed Al-Salaymeh ◽  
Cornelia Rauh ◽  
Antonio Delgado

Reverse transition from the turbulent towards the laminar flow regime was investigated experimentally by progressively increasing the pressure up to 400 MPa in a fully developed pipe flow operated with silicone oil as the working fluid. Using hot-wire anemometry, it is shown indirectly that at low Reynolds numbers a rapid increase in pressure modifies the turbulence dynamics owing to the processes which induce the effects caused by fluid compressibility in the region very close to the wall. The experimental results confirm that under such circumstances, the traditional mechanism responsible for self-maintenance of turbulence in wall-bounded flows is altered in such a way as to lead towards a state in which turbulence cannot persist any longer.


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