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A zonal similarity analysis of friction factors in pipe flow of power law fluids is presented. It uses the critical Reynolds number and friction factor at transition as estimates of the normalised velocity and distance between the wall and…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2010-07-16 Khanh Tuoc Trinh

Intermittent turbulent-laminar patterns characterize the transition to turbulence in pipe, plane Couette and plane channel flows. The time evolution of turbulent-laminar bands in plane channel flow is studied via direct numerical…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2020-09-02 Sébastien Gomé , Laurette S. Tuckerman , Dwight Barkley

The onset of turbulence in laminar flow of viscous fluids is shown to be a consequence of the limited capacity of the fluid to withstand shear stress. This fact is exploited to predict the flow velocity at which laminar flow becomes…

General Physics · Physics 2017-03-22 A. Paglietti

The transition to turbulence in pipe flow does not follow the scenario familiar from Rayleigh-Benard or Taylor-Couette flow since the laminar profile is stable against infinitesimal perturbations for all Reynolds numbers. Moreover, even…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2009-11-13 Bruno Eckhardt , Tobias M. Schneider

Taylor-Couette flow -- the flow between two coaxial co- or counter-rotating cylinders -- is one of the paradigmatic systems in physics of fluids. The (dimensionless) control parameters are the Reynolds numbers of the inner and outer…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2019-04-02 Siegfried Grossmann , Detlef Lohse , Chao Sun

We study laminar, transitional and turbulent flow in wavy pipes using direct numerical simulations for bulk Reynolds numbers between 1-5300. Flow behaviors are analyzed in terms of the friction factor f and mean velocity statistics for…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2026-04-21 Ismail El Mellas , Juan J. Hidalgo , Marco Dentz

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…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2015-08-27 J. Kühnen , M. Holzner , B. Hof , H. Kuhlmann

Modeling of wall-bounded turbulent flows is still an open problem in classical physics, with only modest progress made in the last few decades beyond the so-called `log law', which describes only the intermediate region in wall-bounded…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2018-08-31 Fangying Song , George Em Karniadakis

Turbulence locally created in laminar pipe flows shows sudden decay or splitting after a stochastic waiting time. In laboratory experiments, the mean waiting time was observed to increase double-exponentially as the Reynolds number (Re)…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2021-02-16 Takahiro Nemoto , Alexandros Alexakis

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…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2007-05-23 A. P. Willis , R. R. Kerswell

A parametric numerical study of three-dimensional instability of steady flows in a helical pipe of arbitrary curvature and torsion is carried out. The computations are performed by a numerical approach verified against independent…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2020-11-04 Alexander Gelfgat

The Reynolds number provides a characterization of the transition to turbulent flow, with wide application in classical fluid dynamics. Identifying such a parameter in superfluid systems is challenging due to their fundamentally inviscid…

Quantum Gases · Physics 2015-04-22 M. T. Reeves , T. P. Billam , B. P. Anderson , A. S. Bradley

Transition from laminar to turbulent flow drastically changes the mixing, transport, and drag properties of fluids, yet when and how turbulence emerges is elusive even for simple flow within pipes and rectangular channels. Unlike the onset…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2025-07-22 Masaki Sano , Keiichi Tamai

The fluctuations of turbulence intensity in a pipe flow around the critical Reynolds number is difficult to study but important because they are related to turbulent-laminar transitions. We here propose a rare-event sampling method to study…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2018-02-08 Takahiro Nemoto , Alexandros Alexakis

The onset of turbulence in pipe flow has been a fundamental challenge in physics, applied mathematics, and engineering for over 140 years. To date, the precursor of this laminar-turbulent transition is recognized as transient turbulent…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2025-06-10 Jiashun Guan , Jianjun Tao

Turbulence in fluids is an ubiquitous phenomenon, characterized by spontaneous transition of a smooth, laminar flow to rapidly changing, chaotic dynamics. In 1883, Reynolds experimentally demonstrated that, in an initially laminar flow of…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2022-05-03 Rafail V. Abramov

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…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2016-09-08 Alberto de Lozar , Bjoern Hof

Abrupt transition to turbulence may occur in pipe and channel flows at moderate flow rates, an unexpected event according to linear stability theory, and has been an open problem in fluid dynamics for more than a century. Extensive…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2017-10-09 Jianjun Tao , Xiangming Xiong

Experiments in an extraordinary turbulent boundary layer called the sink flow, displaying a perfect streamwise invariance, show a wide extent of logarithmic scaling for moments of streamwise velocity up to order 12, even at moderate…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2015-11-11 Shivsai Ajit Dixit , O. N. Ramesh

Turbulent spots surrounded by laminar flow are a landmark of transitional shear flows, but the dependence of their kinematic properties on spatial structure is poorly understood. We here investigate this dependence in pipe flow for Reynolds…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2018-01-10 Paul Ritter , Stefan Zammert , Bruno Eckhardt , Marc Avila