Velocity gradient

About: Velocity gradient is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 3013 publications have been published within this topic receiving 77120 citations.

The influence of shear-dependent rheology on turbulent pipe flow

Abstract: Direct numerical simulations of turbulent pipe flow of power-law fluids at are analysed in order to understand the way in which shear thinning or thickening affects first- and second-order flow statistics including turbulent kinetic energy production, transport and dissipation in such flows. The results show that with shear thinning, near-wall streaks become weaker and the axial and azimuthal correlation lengths of axial velocity fluctuations increase. Viscosity fluctuations give rise to an additional shear stress term in the mean momentum equation which is negative for shear-thinning fluids and which increases in magnitude as the fluid becomes more shear thinning: for an equal mean wall shear stress, this term increases the mean velocity gradient in shear-thinning fluids when compared to a Newtonian fluid. Consequently, the mean velocity profile in power-law fluids deviates from the law of the wall in the viscous sublayer when traditional near-wall scaling is used. Consideration is briefly given to an alternative scaling that allows the law of wall to be recovered but which results in loss of a common mean stress profile. With shear thinning, the mean viscosity increases slightly at the wall and its profile appears to be approximately logarithmic in the velocity log layer. Through analysis of the turbulent kinetic energy budget, undertaken here for the first time for generalised Newtonian fluids, it is shown that shear thinning decreases the overall turbulent kinetic energy production but widens the wall-normal region where it is generated. Additional dissipation terms in the mean flow and turbulent kinetic energy budget equations arise from viscosity fluctuations; with shear thinning, these result in a net decrease in the total viscous dissipation. The overall effect of shear thinning on the turbulent kinetic energy budget is found to be largely confined to the inner layers, .

Chemical reaction in a turbulent flow field with uniform velocity gradient

Abstract: A simplified statistical theory is developed which describes the chemically reacting, turbulent shear flows in a tractable manner. This theory, which is based on the concept of the generalized Brownian motion, instead of Navier‐Stokes equation, is completely self‐containing provided that the molecular Schmidt number is of order one and that the local turbulence Reynolds number is sufficiently large. The latter requirement restricts the theory to the flow region outside of the laminar sublayers. The homologous flow and concentration fields are first analyzed for the chemically frozen case. From the analyses, the relationships between the mean velocity and concentration gradients, and the Reynolds stress, turbulence energy, turbulent transport of chemical species, and the mean square fluctuation of the species concentration are established. Comparison of the present results with the available experimental data is made, which shows a satisfactory agreement. The nonequilibrium chemical reaction is then analyzed and is found to create an inhomogeneity in the concentration field which, among other things, causes the mean square fluctuation to vary nonuniformly with respect to the Damkohler number and the flow region.

Calibrating passive scalar transport in shear-flow turbulence.

Abstract: The turbulent diffusivity tensor is determined for linear shear-flow turbulence using numerical simulations. For moderately strong shear, the diagonal components are found to increase quadratically with Peclet and Reynolds numbers below about 10 and then become constant. The diffusivity tensor is found to have components proportional to the symmetric and antisymmetric parts of the velocity gradient matrix, as well as products of these. All components decrease with the wave number of the mean field in a Lorentzian fashion. The components of the diffusivity tensor are found not to depend significantly on the presence of helicity in the turbulence. The signs of the leading terms in the expression for the diffusion tensor are found to be in good agreement with estimates based on a simple closure assumption.

Nematic Director Reorientation at Solid and Liquid Interfaces under Flow: SAXS Studies in a Microfluidic Device

Abstract: In this work we investigate the interplay between flow and boundary condition effects on the orientation field of a thermotropic nematic liquid crystal under flow and confinement in a microfluidic device. Two types of experiments were performed using synchrotron small-angle X-ray-scattering (SAXS). In the first, a nematic liquid crystal flows through a square-channel cross section at varying flow rates, while the nematic director orientation projected onto the velocity/velocity gradient plane is measured using a 2D detector. At moderate-to-high flow rates, the nematic director is predominantly aligned in the flow direction, but with a small tilt angle of ∼±11° in the velocity gradient direction. The director tilt angle is constant throughout most of the channel width but switches sign when crossing the center of the channel, in agreement with the Ericksen–Leslie–Parodi (ELP) theory. At low flow rates, boundary conditions begin to dominate, and a flow profile resembling the escaped radial director configur...