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.
