Elastic turbulence in curvilinear flows of polymer solutions

By A. Groisman, V. Steinberg. 2004

285 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Following our first report (A Groisman and V Steinberg 2000 Nature 405 53), we present an extended account of experimental observations of elasticity-induced turbulence in three different systems: a swirling flow between two plates, a Couette–Taylor (CT) flow between two cylinders, and a flow in a curvilinear channel (Dean flow). All three set-ups had a high ratio of the width of the region available for flow to the radius of curvature of the streamlines. The experiments were carried out with dilute solutions of high-molecular-weight polyacrylamide in concentrated sugar syrups. High polymer relaxation time and solution viscosity ensured prevalence of non-linear elastic effects over inertial non-linearity, and development of purely elastic instabilities at low Reynolds number (Re) in all three flows. Above the elastic instability threshold, flows in all three systems exhibit features of developed turbulence. They include: (i) randomly fluctuating fluid motion excited in a broad range of spatial and temporal scales and (ii) significant increase in the rates of momentum and mass transfer (compared with those expected for a steady flow with a smooth velocity profile). Phenomenology, driving mechanisms and parameter dependence of the elastic turbulence are compared with those of the conventional high-Re hydrodynamic turbulence in Newtonian fluids. Some similarities as well as multiple principal differences were found. In two out of three systems (swirling flow between two plates and flow in the curvilinear channel), power spectra of velocity fluctuations decayed rather quickly, following power laws with exponents of about −3.5. It suggests that, being random in time, the flow is rather smooth in space, in the sense that the main contribution to deformation and mixing (and, possibly, elastic energy) is coming from flow at the largest scale of the system. This situation, random in time and smooth in space, is analogous to flows at small scales (below the Kolmogorov dissipation scale) in high-Re turbulence.

Subfields: Computational Mechanics, Fluid Flow and Transfer Processes, Pulmonary and Respiratory Medicine

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2ed3a60998625f4cd397ba8ed37d53757dce06cc

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Computational Mechanics

In Fluid Flow and Transfer Processes

In Pulmonary and Respiratory Medicine

Citations in the corpus

An introductory essay on subcritical instabilities and the transition to turbulence in visco-elastic parallel shear flows (2007, background): “In fact, various recent high-precision experiments on visco-elastic model fluids have given overwhelming evidence for the presence of turbulence in visco-elastic fluids at low Reynolds numbers [21–25].”
Microfluidics: Fluid physics at the nanoliter scale (2005, background): “36 and elastic instabilities of dilute polymer solutions Groisman and Steinberg, 2001, 2004 have proven effective.”
Perspectives on viscoelastic flow instabilities and elastic turbulence (2021, background): “Groisman and Steinberg suggested that the reduced value of the exponent α found in three-dimensional Taylor Couette flow indicates that the flow is transitional [146], and not fully in the elastic turbulence regime, due to the large shear strain component in Taylor-Couette flow with a small gap and ”