Related papers: How does flow in a pipe become turbulent?
The flow instability and further transition to turbulence in a toroidal pipe (torus) with curvature (tube-to-coiling diameter) 0.049 is investigated experimentally. The flow inside the toroidal pipe is driven by a steel sphere fitted to the…
The linked fluid dynamics videos depict Rayleigh-Taylor turbulence when driven by a complex acceleration profile involving two stages of acceleration interspersed with a stage of stabilizing deceleration. Rayleigh-Taylor (RT) instability…
The transition from laminar to turbulent flow has been a notorious riddle in fluid dynamics since the nineteenth century. Hydrodynamic instabilities were regarded as a cause for the onset of turbulence, but their theoretical investigation…
Depending on the type of flow, the transition to turbulence can take one of two forms: either turbulence arises from a sequence of instabilities or from the spatial proliferation of transiently chaotic domains, a process analogous to…
Laminar flows through pipes driven at steady, pulsatile or oscillatory rates undergo a sub-critical transition to turbulence. We carry out an extensive linear non-modal stability analysis of these flows and show that for sufficiently high…
We demonstrate an unexpected connection between isotropic turbulence and wall-bounded shear flows. We perform direct numerical simulations of isotropic turbulence forced at large scales at moderate Reynolds numbers and observe sudden…
In linearly stable shear flows turbulence spontaneously decays with a characteristic lifetime that varies with Reynolds number. The lifetime sharply increases with Reynolds number so that a possible divergence marking the transition to…
Low Reynolds number turbulence in wall-bounded shear flows en route to laminar flow takes the form of spatially intermittent turbulent structures. In plane shear flows, these appear as a regular pattern of alternating turbulent and…
The transitional boundary layer flow over a flat plate is investigated. The boundary layer flow is known to develop unstable Tollmien-Schlichting waves above a critical value of the Reynolds number. However, it is also known that this…
Turbulent pipe flow is still an essentially open area of research, boosted in the last two decades by considerable progress achieved both on the experimental and numerical frontiers, mainly related to the identification and characterization…
Turbulence is the major cause of friction losses in transport processes and it is responsible for a drastic drag increase in flows over bounding surfaces. While much effort is invested into developing ways to control and reduce turbulence…
The volatile transition from quiescent laminar to strongly fluctuating turbulent dynamics in shear flows remains only poorly understood despite its practical importance and more than a century of intense research. The theoretical…
Active fluids exhibit chaotic flows at low Reynolds number known as active turbulence. Whereas the statistical properties of the chaotic flows are increasingly well understood, the nature of the transition from laminar to turbulent flows as…
Localised turbulent structures such as puffs or oblique stripes are building blocks of the intermittency regimes in subcritical wall-bounded shear flows. These turbulent structures are investigated in incompressible pressure-driven annular…
We show that Directed Percolation (DP) simulations in a pipe geometry in 3+1 dimensions fully capture the observed complex phenomenology of the transition to turbulence. At low Reynolds numbers (Re), turbulent puffs form and spontaneously…
Turbulent stripe, which would occur in turbulent channel flows at transitional Reynolds numbers, was studied experimentally by flow visualization using reflective flake particles. In a range of bulk mean Reynolds number Re = 1700-2000, the…
The statistics of the relaminarisation of localised turbulence in a pipe are examined by direct numerical simulation. As in recent experimental data (Peixinho & Mullin, Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 094501, 2006), the half life for the decaying…
Plane Poiseuille flow, the pressure driven flow between parallel plates, shows a route to turbulence connected with a linear instability to Tollmien-Schlichting (TS) waves, and another one, the bypass transition, that is triggered with…
Fluid flows between rotating concentric cylinders exhibit two distinct routes to turbulence. In flows dominated by inner-cylinder rotation, a sequence of linear instabilities leads to temporally chaotic dynamics as the rotation speed is…
The transition to turbulence exhibits remarkable spatio-temporal behavior that continues to defy detailed understanding. Near the onset to turbulence in pipes, transient turbulent regions decay either directly or, at higher Reynolds numbers…