Elastic turbulence in a polymer solution flow

By A. Groisman, V. Steinberg. Nature, 2000

800 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Turbulence is a ubiquitous phenomenon that is not fully understood. It is known that the flow of a simple, newtonian fluid is likely to be turbulent when the Reynolds number is large (typically when the velocity is high, the viscosity is low and the size of the tank is large). In contrast, viscoelastic fluids such as solutions of flexible long-chain polymers have nonlinear mechanical properties and therefore may be expected to behave differently. Here we observe experimentally that the flow of a sufficiently elastic polymer solution can become irregular even at low velocity, high viscosity and in a small tank. The fluid motion is excited in a broad range of spatial and temporal scales, and we observe an increase in the flow resistance by a factor of about twenty. Although the Reynolds number may be arbitrarily low, the observed flow has all the main features of developed turbulence. A comparable state of turbulent flow for a newtonian fluid in a pipe would have a Reynolds number as high as 105 (refs 1, 2). The low Reynolds number or ‘elastic’ turbulence that we observe is accompanied by significant stretching of the polymer molecules, resulting in an increase in the elastic stresses of up to two orders of magnitude.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Computational Mechanics, Fluid Flow and Transfer Processes

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4e36734cb38a15cc3838ca4f238ed7f7c86b602f

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Citations in the corpus

Simulating the dynamics and interactions of flexible fibers in Stokes flows (2004, background): “Another very interesting, and very current, set of problems starts with the discoveries that fluids can be mixed efficiently at low Reynolds number by using viscoelastic fluids [17,18], and that such fluids can be used for control of microfluidic devices [16].”
Microswimming in viscoelastic fluids (2021, background): “The role of polymer in destabilizing swimmer suspensions is reminiscent of the occurrence of viscoelastic turbulence at negligible Reynolds numbers [208,209].”
A review of nonlinear oscillatory shear tests: Analysis and application of large amplitude oscillatory shear (LAOS) (2011, background): “wall slip [72,73], elastic instability [74,75], secondary flows in the parallel plates [76], or shear banding [77], and second, by imperfect (anharmonic) mechanical excitation, back-lash in the torsional actuator imposing the deformation and so on.”
Kinetic theory representation of hydrodynamics: a way beyond the Navier–Stokes equation (2006, background): “There are examples of turbulence-like instabilities (Groisman & Steinberg 2000) in the flows of polymer solutions at modest-Reynolds-number, but high-Deborah-number regimes.”
Numerical Methods for Viscoelastic Fluid Flows (2021, background): “On account of their small length scales, Re is low and Wi can be high on such circuits, driving the fluid dynamics to new phenomena, including elastic turbulence (Groisman & Steinberg 2000) and other elasticity-driven flow transitions.”
Perspectives on viscoelastic flow instabilities and elastic turbulence (2021, methodology): “Only for small Wi was the exponent α > 3, which is considered to be a signature for turbulent flow and was measured in several experiments [44, 150].”
An introductory essay on subcritical instabilities and the transition to turbulence in visco-elastic parallel shear flows (2007, methodology): “As Groisman and Steinberg [22] point out, in Newtonian turbulence one has to go up to Reynolds numbers of order 104 to get such very large enhancements!”
Phonons in a one-dimensional microfluidic crystal (2006, background): “Finally, we note that waves and instabilities at ultra-low Re have been observed in the context of elastic turbulenc”
Microfluidics: Fluid physics at the nanoliter scale (2005, background): “Such elastic instabilities in a saturated nonlinear state give rise to irregular fluctuations and elastic turbulence Groisman and Steinberg, 2000, 2004; Larson, 2000 , which has been exploited to enhance microfluidic mixing Groisman and Steinberg, 2001 .”
Recent experimental probes of shear banding (2008, background): “Although very informative, purely rheological studies do not allow to discriminate between shear banding and other possible space- and time-dependent phenomena that may occur in complex fluids such as wall slip [9,51], stick-slip [33,55,163], fracture [26, 85,93,121], tumbling in nematic materials [”
Symmetry, Thermodynamics, and Topology in Active Matter (2021, background): “Active turbulence is a distinct phenomenon from the wellknown inertial turbulence of high-Reynolds number fluids, perhaps more akin to the elastic turbulence observed twenty years ago in sheared polymer solutions [40], where nonlinear elastic effects can destabilize laminar flow.”