Structural vibrations caused by a flowing fluid. Whenever a structure is exposed to a flowing fluid,…

Flow-induced vibration

Flow physics plays a key role in nearly every facet of the COVID-19 pandemic. This includes the generation and aerosolization of virus-laden respiratory droplets from a host, its airborne dispersion and deposition on surfaces, as well as the subsequent inhalation of these bioaerosols by unsuspecting recipients. Fluid dynamics is also key to preventative measures such as the use of face masks, hand-washing, ventilation of indoor environments, and even social distancing. This article summarizes what we know, and more importantly, what we need to learn about the science underlying these issues so that we are better prepared to tackle the next outbreak of COVID-19 or a similar disease.

Flow Physics of COVID-19

Emerging metallic systems for additive manufacturing : in-situ alloying and multi-metal processing in laser powder bed fusion

As a crucial branch for titanium industry, high-strength titanium alloys (HS-TAs, with UTS ≥ 1100 MPa) are indispensable structural materials for advanced engineering applications such as aerospace and marine fields. Along with the expansion of HS-TAs’ market, achieving satisfying synergies of high strength, high ductility (elongation ≥ 6%) and high toughness (KIC ≥ 50 MPa⋅m1/2) has been identified as the uppermost technical bottleneck for their research and development. To overcome the challenge, two primary strategies have been initiated by the titanium community, developing novel alloys and innovating processing technologies. For the former, a dozen of newly-developed alloys were reported to exhibit excellent strength-ductility-toughness combinations, including Ti-5553, BT22, TC21 and Ti-1300, for which the ideal mechanical performances were based on specific microstructures realized by low impurity rate (e.g. oxygen content ≤ 0.15 wt%), complicated processing and complex heat treatment. For the latter, several innovatory forging and heat treatment technologies were originated for the mature alloys to optimize their balanced property by extraordinary microstructural characteristics. In this review, we provide a comprehensive overview over the research status, processing and heat treatment technologies, phase transformation, processing-microstructure-property correlation and strengthening-toughening mechanism of HS-TAs for aerospace engineering applications manufactured via melting-forging process. Finally, the prospects and recommendations for further investigation and development are proposed based on this review. 

High-strength titanium alloys for aerospace engineering applications: A review on melting-forging process

Surface roughness can significantly influence the fluid dynamics and heat transfer in convective flows by inducing perturbations in the velocity profile which affect surface drag, turbulent mixing and heat transfer. While surface roughness can often negatively affect the performance of systems, it can also lead to performance improvements, such as in convective flows where roughness elements have been shown to enhance heat transfer. Turbulent flows over rough surfaces have been studied for about a century leading to significant developments in this field. Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) has made significant contributions to the knowledge of turbulent flows over rough surfaces as well as evaluation of the developed theories. Moreover, the turbulent closures model has seen wide use for simulation of rough-wall turbulent flows in practical applications where DNS is hindered by its complexity and computational resources. Despite a significant number of experimental and CFD studies and the latest advances in this field, a recent review was not available. Therefore, this review surveys the past and recent experimental and numerical studies to address the fundamentals and theories related to the structure of turbulent flows over rough walls. This study chiefly investigates the structure of mean flow profile over rough surfaces, and its correlation with smooth wall mean flow profile. This review study can contribute to prospective experimental and CFD work, and for characterising rough-wall turbulent flows and heat transfer in different academic and engineering applications such as aerodynamics, hydraulics, meteorology, and manufacturing. The review concludes that despite significant progress, the structure of turbulent flow is still not fully understood. This is mainly due to a lack of systematic studies on the structure of turbulent flow and also due to the variety of roughness which influence the dynamics of the flow in the roughness sublayers. The current roughness scale (sand-grain roughness height) fails to completely characterise roughness in many cases. Therefore, there is a need for a universal roughness scale that can describe every type of roughness and be used in any rough-flow regimes, including fully rough and transitionally rough regimes.

A review on turbulent flow over rough surfaces: Fundamentals and theories

The ambient conditions surrounding liquid droplets determine their growth or shrinkage. However, the precise fate of a liquid droplet expelled from a respiratory puff as dictated by its surroundings and the puff itself has not yet been fully quantified. From the view of airborne disease transmission, such as SARS-CoV-2, knowledge of such dependencies is critical. Here, we employ direct numerical simulations (DNS) of a turbulent respiratory vapor puff and account for the mass and temperature exchange with respiratory droplets and aerosols. In particular, we investigate how droplets respond to different ambient temperatures and relative humidity (RH) by tracking their Lagrangian statistics. We reveal and quantify that in cold and humid environments, as there the respiratory puff is supersaturated, expelled droplets can first experience significant growth, and only later followed by shrinkage, in contrast to the monotonic shrinkage of droplets as expected from the classical view by Wells in 1934. Indeed, cold and humid environments diminish the ability of air to hold water vapor, thus causing the respiratory vapor puff to supersaturate. Consequently, the supersaturated vapor field drives the growth of droplets that are caught and transported within the humid puff. To analytically predict the likelihood for droplet growth, we propose a model for the axial RH based on the assumption of a quasistationary jet. Our model correctly predicts supersaturated RH conditions and is in good quantitative agreement with our DNS. Our results culminate in a temperature-RH map that can be employed as an indicator for droplet growth or shrinkage.

https://link.aps.org/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevFluids.6.054303

Growth of respiratory droplets in cold and humid air

This paper examines the recovery of the wall-shear stress of a turbulent boundary layer that has undergone a sudden transition from a rough to a smooth surface. Early work of Antonia & Luxton (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 53, 1972, pp. 737–757) questioned the reliability of standard smooth-wall methods for measuring wall-shear stress in such conditions, and subsequent studies show significant disagreement depending on the approach used to determine the wall-shear stress downstream. Here we address this by utilising a collection of experimental databases at 𝜏Re𝜏≈4100 that have access to both ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ measures of the wall-shear stress to understand the recovery to equilibrium conditions of the new surface. Our results reveal that the viscous region ( z+≲4 ) recovers almost immediately to an equilibrium state with the new wall conditions; however, the buffer region and beyond takes several boundary layer thicknesses before recovering to equilibrium conditions, which is longer than previously thought. A unique direct numerical simulation database of a wall-bounded flow with a rough-to-smooth wall transition is employed to confirm these findings. In doing so, we present evidence that any estimate of the wall-shear stress from the mean velocity profile in the buffer region or further away from the wall tends to underestimate its magnitude in the near vicinity of the rough-to-smooth transition, and this is likely to be partly responsible for the large scatter of recovery lengths to equilibrium conditions reported in the literature. Our results also reveal that smaller energetic scales in the near-wall region recover to an equilibrium state associated with the new wall conditions within one boundary layer thickness downstream of the transition, while larger energetic scales exhibit an over-energised state for several boundary layer thicknesses downstream of the transition. Based on these observations, an alternative approach to estimating the wall-shear stress from the premultiplied energy spectrum is proposed.

/pdf/recovery-of-wall-shear-stress-to-equilibrium-flow-conditions-da0g4ik8co.pdf

Recovery of wall-shear stress to equilibrium flow conditions after a rough-to-smooth step change in turbulent boundary layers

The ambient conditions surrounding liquid droplets determine their growth or shrinkage. However, the precise fate of a liquid droplet expelled from a respiratory puff as dictated by its surroundings and the puff itself has not yet been fully quantified. From the view of airborne disease transmission, such as SARS-CoV-2, knowledge of such dependencies are critical. Here we employ direct numerical simulations (DNS) of a turbulent respiratory vapour puff and account for the mass and temperature exchange with respiratory droplets and aerosols. In particular, we investigate how droplets respond to different ambient temperatures and relative humidity (RH) by tracking their Lagrangian statistics. We reveal and quantify that in cold and humid environments, as there the respiratory puff is supersaturated, expelled droplets can first experience significant growth, and only later followed by shrinkage, in contrast to the monotonic shrinkage of droplets as expected from the classical view by William F. Wells (1934). Indeed, cold and humid environments diminish the ability of air to hold water vapour, thus causing the respiratory vapour puff to super-saturate. Consequently, the super-saturated vapour field drives the growth of droplets that are caught and transported within the humid puff. To analytically predict the likelihood for droplet growth, we propose a model for the axial RH based on the assumption of a quasi-stationary jet. Our model correctly predicts super-saturated RH conditions and is in good quantitative agreement with our DNS. Our results culminate in a temperature-RH map that can be employed as an indicator for droplet growth or shrinkage. Significance Statement Influence of environmental conditions on airborne diseases transmission is an important issue, especially during the pandemic of COVID-19. Human-to-human transmission is mediated by the transport of virus-laden respiratory droplets. Here we investigate the problem from a fluid mechanics perspective by conducting numerical simulations to quantify the fate of respiratory droplets in a warm humid coughing puff under different ambient conditions. We reveal a non-intuitive regime with considerable growth of respiratory droplets, dominated by a super-saturated vapour field, preferentially occurring in cold and humid environments. We further propose a theoretical model that accurately predicts the condition for droplet growth. Our work should inform socializing policies and ventilation strategies for controlling indoor ambient conditions to mitigate dispersion of droplets from asymptomatic individuals.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/medrxiv/early/2020/11/03/2020.10.30.20222604.full.pdf

The wake of polygonal cylinders with side number N=2∼∞N=2∼∞ is systematically studied based on fluid force, hot-wire, particle image velocimetry and flow visualisation measurements. Each cylinder is examined for two orientations, with a flat surface or a corner leading and facing normally to the free stream. The Reynolds number ReRe is 1.0×104∼1.0×1051.0×104∼1.0×105, based on the longitudinally projected cylinder width. The time-averaged drag coefficient CDCD and fluctuating lift coefficient on these cylinders are documented, along with the characteristic properties including the Strouhal number StSt, flow separation point and angle θs????s, wake width and critical Reynolds number RecRec at which the transition from laminar to turbulent flow occurs. It is found that once NN exceeds 12, RecRec depends on the difference between the inner diameter (tangent to the faces) and the outer diameter (connecting corners) of a polygon, the relationship being approximately given by the dependence of RecRec on the height of the roughness elements for a circular cylinder. It is further found that CDCD versus ξ???? or StSt versus ξ???? for all the tested cases collapse onto a single curve, where the angle ξ???? is the corrected θs????s associated with the laterally widest point of the polygon and the separation point. Finally, the empirical correlation between CDCD and StSt is discussed.

/pdf/experimental-study-of-flow-around-polygonal-cylinders-2oorepqzjn.pdf

Mogeng Li

Papers

Growth of respiratory droplets in cold and humid air

Recovery of wall-shear stress to equilibrium flow conditions after a rough-to-smooth step change in turbulent boundary layers

Growth of respiratory droplets in cold and humid air

Experimental study of flow around polygonal cylinders

Extension at the downstream end of turbulent band in channel flow