@article{14341, abstract = {Flows through pipes and channels are, in practice, almost always turbulent, and the multiscale eddying motion is responsible for a major part of the encountered friction losses and pumping costs1. Conversely, for pulsatile flows, in particular for aortic blood flow, turbulence levels remain low despite relatively large peak velocities. For aortic blood flow, high turbulence levels are intolerable as they would damage the shear-sensitive endothelial cell layer2,3,4,5. Here we show that turbulence in ordinary pipe flow is diminished if the flow is driven in a pulsatile mode that incorporates all the key features of the cardiac waveform. At Reynolds numbers comparable to those of aortic blood flow, turbulence is largely inhibited, whereas at much higher speeds, the turbulent drag is reduced by more than 25%. This specific operation mode is more efficient when compared with steady driving, which is the present situation for virtually all fluid transport processes ranging from heating circuits to water, gas and oil pipelines.}, author = {Scarselli, Davide and Lopez Alonso, Jose M and Varshney, Atul and Hof, Björn}, issn = {1476-4687}, journal = {Nature}, number = {7977}, pages = {71--74}, publisher = {Springer Nature}, title = {{Turbulence suppression by cardiac-cycle-inspired driving of pipe flow}}, doi = {10.1038/s41586-023-06399-5}, volume = {621}, year = {2023}, } @article{10299, abstract = {Turbulence generally arises in shear flows if velocities and hence, inertial forces are sufficiently large. In striking contrast, viscoelastic fluids can exhibit disordered motion even at vanishing inertia. Intermediate between these cases, a state of chaotic motion, “elastoinertial turbulence” (EIT), has been observed in a narrow Reynolds number interval. We here determine the origin of EIT in experiments and show that characteristic EIT structures can be detected across an unexpectedly wide range of parameters. Close to onset, a pattern of chevron-shaped streaks emerges in qualitative agreement with linear and weakly nonlinear theory. However, in experiments, the dynamics remain weakly chaotic, and the instability can be traced to far lower Reynolds numbers than permitted by theory. For increasing inertia, the flow undergoes a transformation to a wall mode composed of inclined near-wall streaks and shear layers. This mode persists to what is known as the “maximum drag reduction limit,” and overall EIT is found to dominate viscoelastic flows across more than three orders of magnitude in Reynolds number.}, author = {Choueiri, George H and Lopez Alonso, Jose M and Varshney, Atul and Sankar, Sarath and Hof, Björn}, issn = {1091-6490}, journal = {Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences}, keywords = {multidisciplinary, elastoinertial turbulence, viscoelastic flows, elastic instability, drag reduction}, number = {45}, publisher = {National Academy of Sciences}, title = {{Experimental observation of the origin and structure of elastoinertial turbulence}}, doi = {10.1073/pnas.2102350118}, volume = {118}, year = {2021}, } @article{7364, abstract = {We present nsCouette, a highly scalable software tool to solve the Navier–Stokes equations for incompressible fluid flow between differentially heated and independently rotating, concentric cylinders. It is based on a pseudospectral spatial discretization and dynamic time-stepping. It is implemented in modern Fortran with a hybrid MPI-OpenMP parallelization scheme and thus designed to compute turbulent flows at high Reynolds and Rayleigh numbers. An additional GPU implementation (C-CUDA) for intermediate problem sizes and a version for pipe flow (nsPipe) are also provided.}, author = {Lopez Alonso, Jose M and Feldmann, Daniel and Rampp, Markus and Vela-Martín, Alberto and Shi, Liang and Avila, Marc}, issn = {23527110}, journal = {SoftwareX}, publisher = {Elsevier}, title = {{nsCouette – A high-performance code for direct numerical simulations of turbulent Taylor–Couette flow}}, doi = {10.1016/j.softx.2019.100395}, volume = {11}, year = {2020}, } @article{7397, abstract = {Polymer additives can substantially reduce the drag of turbulent flows and the upperlimit, the so called “maximum drag reduction” (MDR) asymptote is universal, i.e. inde-pendent of the type of polymer and solvent used. Until recently, the consensus was that,in this limit, flows are in a marginal state where only a minimal level of turbulence activ-ity persists. Observations in direct numerical simulations using minimal sized channelsappeared to support this view and reported long “hibernation” periods where turbu-lence is marginalized. In simulations of pipe flow we find that, indeed, with increasingWeissenberg number (Wi), turbulence expresses long periods of hibernation if the domainsize is small. However, with increasing pipe length, the temporal hibernation continuouslyalters to spatio-temporal intermittency and here the flow consists of turbulent puffs sur-rounded by laminar flow. Moreover, upon an increase in Wi, the flow fully relaminarises,in agreement with recent experiments. At even larger Wi, a different instability is en-countered causing a drag increase towards MDR. Our findings hence link earlier minimalflow unit simulations with recent experiments and confirm that the addition of polymersinitially suppresses Newtonian turbulence and leads to a reverse transition. The MDRstate on the other hand results from a separate instability and the underlying dynamicscorresponds to the recently proposed state of elasto-inertial-turbulence (EIT).}, author = {Lopez Alonso, Jose M and Choueiri, George H and Hof, Björn}, issn = {1469-7645}, journal = {Journal of Fluid Mechanics}, pages = {699--719}, publisher = {CUP}, title = {{Dynamics of viscoelastic pipe flow at low Reynolds numbers in the maximum drag reduction limit}}, doi = {10.1017/jfm.2019.486}, volume = {874}, year = {2019}, } @article{6413, abstract = {Phase-field methods have long been used to model the flow of immiscible fluids. Their ability to naturally capture interface topological changes is widely recognized, but their accuracy in simulating flows of real fluids in practical geometries is not established. We here quantitatively investigate the convergence of the phase-field method to the sharp-interface limit with simulations of two-phase pipe flow. We focus on core-annular flows, in which a highly viscous fluid is lubricated by a less viscous fluid, and validate our simulations with an analytic laminar solution, a formal linear stability analysis and also in the fully nonlinear regime. We demonstrate the ability of the phase-field method to accurately deal with non-rectangular geometry, strong advection, unsteady fluctuations and large viscosity contrast. We argue that phase-field methods are very promising for quantitatively studying moderately turbulent flows, especially at high concentrations of the disperse phase.}, author = {Song, Baofang and Plana, Carlos and Lopez Alonso, Jose M and Avila, Marc}, issn = {03019322}, journal = {International Journal of Multiphase Flow}, pages = {14--24}, publisher = {Elsevier}, title = {{Phase-field simulation of core-annular pipe flow}}, doi = {10.1016/j.ijmultiphaseflow.2019.04.027}, volume = {117}, year = {2019}, } @article{328, abstract = {The drag of turbulent flows can be drastically decreased by adding small amounts of high molecular weight polymers. While drag reduction initially increases with polymer concentration, it eventually saturates to what is known as the maximum drag reduction (MDR) asymptote; this asymptote is generally attributed to the dynamics being reduced to a marginal yet persistent state of subdued turbulent motion. Contrary to this accepted view, we show that, for an appropriate choice of parameters, polymers can reduce the drag beyond the suggested asymptotic limit, eliminating turbulence and giving way to laminar flow. At higher polymer concentrations, however, the laminar state becomes unstable, resulting in a fluctuating flow with the characteristic drag of the MDR asymptote. Our findings indicate that the asymptotic state is hence dynamically disconnected from ordinary turbulence. © 2018 American Physical Society.}, author = {Choueiri, George H and Lopez Alonso, Jose M and Hof, Björn}, journal = {Physical Review Letters}, number = {12}, publisher = {American Physical Society}, title = {{Exceeding the asymptotic limit of polymer drag reduction}}, doi = {10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.124501}, volume = {120}, year = {2018}, } @article{1021, abstract = {Most flows in nature and engineering are turbulent because of their large velocities and spatial scales. Laboratory experiments on rotating quasi-Keplerian flows, for which the angular velocity decreases radially but the angular momentum increases, are however laminar at Reynolds numbers exceeding one million. This is in apparent contradiction to direct numerical simulations showing that in these experiments turbulence transition is triggered by the axial boundaries. We here show numerically that as the Reynolds number increases, turbulence becomes progressively confined to the boundary layers and the flow in the bulk fully relaminarizes. Our findings support that turbulence is unlikely to occur in isothermal constant-density quasi-Keplerian flows.}, author = {Lopez Alonso, Jose M and Avila, Marc}, issn = {00221120}, journal = {Journal of Fluid Mechanics}, pages = {21 -- 34}, publisher = {Cambridge University Press}, title = {{Boundary layer turbulence in experiments on quasi Keplerian flows}}, doi = {10.1017/jfm.2017.109}, volume = {817}, year = {2017}, }