Nordita seminar

Elastic turbulence and turbulent drag reduction problem

by Victor Steinberg (Department of Physics of Complex Systems, Weizmann Institute of Science)

Europe/Stockholm
132:028

132:028

Description
For years the experimental and theoretical studies of turbulent drag reduction were concentrated on extracting relevant information only from structure and statistics of velocity field measurements. Only recently it was suggested in addition to also investigate an elastic stress field, which has a direct relation to modifications of turbulent flow by adding polymers. We experimentally study structure and statistics of the elastic stress field in a related elastic turbulent flow of a dilute polymer solution and found unexpected for this flow boundary layer for elastic stresses and strongly non-uniform distribution of elastic stresses in the flow. We discuss possible implications of these results to the turbulent drag reduction problem.