Drag enhancement and drag reduction in viscoelastic flow

Atul Varshney and Victor Steinberg
Phys. Rev. Fluids 3, 103302 – Published 15 October 2018
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Abstract

Creeping flow of polymeric fluid without inertia exhibits elastic instabilities and elastic turbulence accompanied by drag enhancement due to elastic stress produced by flow-stretched polymers. However, in inertia-dominated flow at high Re and low fluid elasticity El, a reduction in turbulent frictional drag is caused by an intricate competition between inertial and elastic stresses. Here we explore the effect of inertia on the stability of viscoelastic flow in a broad range of control parameters El and (Re,Wi). We present the stability diagram of observed flow regimes in WiRe coordinates and find that the instabilities' onsets show an unexpectedly nonmonotonic dependence on El. Further, three distinct regions in the diagram are identified based on El. Strikingly, for high-elasticity fluids we discover a complete relaminarization of flow at Reynolds number in the range of 1 to 10, different from a well-known turbulent drag reduction. These counterintuitive effects may be explained by a finite polymer extensibility and a suppression of vorticity at high Wi. Our results call for further theoretical and numerical development to uncover the role of inertial effect on elastic turbulence in a viscoelastic flow.

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  • Received 29 May 2018

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevFluids.3.103302

©2018 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Polymers & Soft Matter

Authors & Affiliations

Atul Varshney1,2 and Victor Steinberg1,3

  • 1Department of Physics of Complex Systems, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel
  • 2Institute of Science and Technology Austria, Am Campus 1, 3400 Klosterneuburg, Austria
  • 3Racah Institute of Physics, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem 91904, Israel

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Issue

Vol. 3, Iss. 10 — October 2018

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