TY - JOUR AB - We report the results of an experimental investigation into the decay of turbulence in plane Couette–Poiseuille flow using ‘quench’ experiments where the flow laminarises after a sudden reduction in Reynolds number Re. Specifically, we study the velocity field in the streamwise–spanwise plane. We show that the spanwise velocity containing rolls decays faster than the streamwise velocity, which displays elongated regions of higher or lower velocity called streaks. At final Reynolds numbers above 425, the decay of streaks displays two stages: first a slow decay when rolls are present and secondly a more rapid decay of streaks alone. The difference in behaviour results from the regeneration of streaks by rolls, called the lift-up effect. We define the turbulent fraction as the portion of the flow containing turbulence and this is estimated by thresholding the spanwise velocity component. It decreases linearly with time in the whole range of final Re. The corresponding decay slope increases linearly with final Re. The extrapolated value at which this decay slope vanishes is Reaz≈656±10, close to Reg≈670 at which turbulence is self-sustained. The decay of the energy computed from the spanwise velocity component is found to be exponential. The corresponding decay rate increases linearly with Re, with an extrapolated vanishing value at ReAz≈688±10. This value is also close to the value at which the turbulence is self-sustained, showing that valuable information on the transition can be obtained over a wide range of Re. AU - Liu, T. AU - Semin, B. AU - Klotz, Lukasz AU - Godoy-Diana, R. AU - Wesfreid, J. E. AU - Mullin, T. ID - 9297 JF - Journal of Fluid Mechanics SN - 0022-1120 TI - Decay of streaks and rolls in plane Couette-Poiseuille flow VL - 915 ER - TY - JOUR AB - High impact epidemics constitute one of the largest threats humanity is facing in the 21st century. In the absence of pharmaceutical interventions, physical distancing together with testing, contact tracing and quarantining are crucial in slowing down epidemic dynamics. Yet, here we show that if testing capacities are limited, containment may fail dramatically because such combined countermeasures drastically change the rules of the epidemic transition: Instead of continuous, the response to countermeasures becomes discontinuous. Rather than following the conventional exponential growth, the outbreak that is initially strongly suppressed eventually accelerates and scales faster than exponential during an explosive growth period. As a consequence, containment measures either suffice to stop the outbreak at low total case numbers or fail catastrophically if marginally too weak, thus implying large uncertainties in reliably estimating overall epidemic dynamics, both during initial phases and during second wave scenarios. AU - Scarselli, Davide AU - Budanur, Nazmi B AU - Timme, Marc AU - Hof, Björn ID - 9407 IS - 1 JF - Nature Communications TI - Discontinuous epidemic transition due to limited testing VL - 12 ER - TY - JOUR AB - Turbulence in the flow of fluid through a pipe can be suppressed by buoyancy forces. As the suppression of turbulence leads to severe heat transfer deterioration, this is an important and undesirable phenomenon in both heating and cooling applications. Vertical flow is often considered, as the axial buoyancy force can help drive the flow. With heating measured by the buoyancy parameter 𝐶, our direct numerical simulations show that shear-driven turbulence may either be completely laminarised or it transitions to a relatively quiescent convection-driven state. Buoyancy forces cause a flattening of the base flow profile, which in isothermal pipe flow has recently been linked to complete suppression of turbulence (Kühnen et al., Nat. Phys., vol. 14, 2018, pp. 386–390), and the flattened laminar base profile has enhanced nonlinear stability (Marensi et al., J. Fluid Mech., vol. 863, 2019, pp. 50–875). In agreement with these findings, the nonlinear lower-branch travelling-wave solution analysed here, which is believed to mediate transition to turbulence in isothermal pipe flow, is shown to be suppressed by buoyancy. A linear instability of the laminar base flow is responsible for the appearance of the relatively quiescent convection driven state for 𝐶≳4 across the range of Reynolds numbers considered. In the suppression of turbulence, however, i.e. in the transition from turbulence, we find clearer association with the analysis of He et al. (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 809, 2016, pp. 31–71) than with the above dynamical systems approach, which describes better the transition to turbulence. The laminarisation criterion He et al. propose, based on an apparent Reynolds number of the flow as measured by its driving pressure gradient, is found to capture the critical 𝐶=𝐶𝑐𝑟(𝑅𝑒) above which the flow will be laminarised or switch to the convection-driven type. Our analysis suggests that it is the weakened rolls, rather than the streaks, which appear to be critical for laminarisation. AU - Marensi, Elena AU - He, Shuisheng AU - Willis, Ashley P. ID - 9467 JF - Journal of Fluid Mechanics SN - 00221120 TI - Suppression of turbulence and travelling waves in a vertical heated pipe VL - 919 ER - TY - JOUR AB - We show that turbulent dynamics that arise in simulations of the three-dimensional Navier--Stokes equations in a triply-periodic domain under sinusoidal forcing can be described as transient visits to the neighborhoods of unstable time-periodic solutions. Based on this description, we reduce the original system with more than 10^5 degrees of freedom to a 17-node Markov chain where each node corresponds to the neighborhood of a periodic orbit. The model accurately reproduces long-term averages of the system's observables as weighted sums over the periodic orbits. AU - Yalniz, Gökhan AU - Hof, Björn AU - Budanur, Nazmi B ID - 9558 IS - 24 JF - Physical Review Letters SN - 0031-9007 TI - Coarse graining the state space of a turbulent flow using periodic orbits VL - 126 ER - TY - JOUR AB - Single photon emitters in atomically-thin semiconductors can be deterministically positioned using strain induced by underlying nano-structures. Here, we couple monolayer WSe2 to high-refractive-index gallium phosphide dielectric nano-antennas providing both optical enhancement and monolayer deformation. For single photon emitters formed on such nano-antennas, we find very low (femto-Joule) saturation pulse energies and up to 104 times brighter photoluminescence than in WSe2 placed on low-refractive-index SiO2 pillars. We show that the key to these observations is the increase on average by a factor of 5 of the quantum efficiency of the emitters coupled to the nano-antennas. This further allows us to gain new insights into their photoluminescence dynamics, revealing the roles of the dark exciton reservoir and Auger processes. We also find that the coherence time of such emitters is limited by intrinsic dephasing processes. Our work establishes dielectric nano-antennas as a platform for high-efficiency quantum light generation in monolayer semiconductors. AU - Sortino, Luca AU - Zotev, Panaiot G. AU - Phillips, Catherine L. AU - Brash, Alistair J. AU - Cambiasso, Javier AU - Marensi, Elena AU - Fox, A. Mark AU - Maier, Stefan A. AU - Sapienza, Riccardo AU - Tartakovskii, Alexander I. ID - 10203 JF - Nature Communications TI - Bright single photon emitters with enhanced quantum efficiency in a two-dimensional semiconductor coupled with dielectric nano-antennas VL - 12 ER - TY - JOUR AB - 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. AU - Choueiri, George H AU - Lopez Alonso, Jose M AU - Varshney, Atul AU - Sankar, Sarath AU - Hof, Björn ID - 10299 IS - 45 JF - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences KW - multidisciplinary KW - elastoinertial turbulence KW - viscoelastic flows KW - elastic instability KW - drag reduction SN - 0027-8424 TI - Experimental observation of the origin and structure of elastoinertial turbulence VL - 118 ER - TY - THES AB - Most real-world flows are multiphase, yet we know little about them compared to their single-phase counterparts. Multiphase flows are more difficult to investigate as their dynamics occur in large parameter space and involve complex phenomena such as preferential concentration, turbulence modulation, non-Newtonian rheology, etc. Over the last few decades, experiments in particle-laden flows have taken a back seat in favour of ever-improving computational resources. However, computers are still not powerful enough to simulate a real-world fluid with millions of finite-size particles. Experiments are essential not only because they offer a reliable way to investigate real-world multiphase flows but also because they serve to validate numerical studies and steer the research in a relevant direction. In this work, we have experimentally investigated particle-laden flows in pipes, and in particular, examined the effect of particles on the laminar-turbulent transition and the drag scaling in turbulent flows. For particle-laden pipe flows, an earlier study [Matas et al., 2003] reported how the sub-critical (i.e., hysteretic) transition that occurs via localised turbulent structures called puffs is affected by the addition of particles. In this study, in addition to this known transition, we found a super-critical transition to a globally fluctuating state with increasing particle concentration. At the same time, the Newtonian-type transition via puffs is delayed to larger Reynolds numbers. At an even higher concentration, only the globally fluctuating state is found. The dynamics of particle-laden flows are hence determined by two competing instabilities that give rise to three flow regimes: Newtonian-type turbulence at low, a particle-induced globally fluctuating state at high, and a coexistence state at intermediate concentrations. The effect of particles on turbulent drag is ambiguous, with studies reporting drag reduction, no net change, and even drag increase. The ambiguity arises because, in addition to particle concentration, particle shape, size, and density also affect the net drag. Even similar particles might affect the flow dissimilarly in different Reynolds number and concentration ranges. In the present study, we explored a wide range of both Reynolds number and concentration, using spherical as well as cylindrical particles. We found that the spherical particles do not reduce drag while the cylindrical particles are drag-reducing within a specific Reynolds number interval. The interval strongly depends on the particle concentration and the relative size of the pipe and particles. Within this interval, the magnitude of drag reduction reaches a maximum. These drag reduction maxima appear to fall onto a distinct power-law curve irrespective of the pipe diameter and particle concentration, and this curve can be considered as the maximum drag reduction asymptote for a given fibre shape. Such an asymptote is well known for polymeric flows but had not been identified for particle-laden flows prior to this work. AU - Agrawal, Nishchal ID - 9728 KW - Drag Reduction KW - Transition to Turbulence KW - Multiphase Flows KW - particle Laden Flows KW - Complex Flows KW - Experiments KW - Fluid Dynamics SN - 2663-337X TI - Transition to turbulence and drag reduction in particle-laden pipe flows ER - TY - JOUR AB - 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. AU - Lopez Alonso, Jose M AU - Feldmann, Daniel AU - Rampp, Markus AU - Vela-Martín, Alberto AU - Shi, Liang AU - Avila, Marc ID - 7364 JF - SoftwareX TI - nsCouette – A high-performance code for direct numerical simulations of turbulent Taylor–Couette flow VL - 11 ER - TY - JOUR AB - In the past two decades, our understanding of the transition to turbulence in shear flows with linearly stable laminar solutions has greatly improved. Regarding the susceptibility of the laminar flow, two concepts have been particularly useful: the edge states and the minimal seeds. In this nonlinear picture of the transition, the basin boundary of turbulence is set by the edge state's stable manifold and this manifold comes closest in energy to the laminar equilibrium at the minimal seed. We begin this paper by presenting numerical experiments in which three-dimensional perturbations are too energetic to trigger turbulence in pipe flow but they do lead to turbulence when their amplitude is reduced. We show that this seemingly counterintuitive observation is in fact consistent with the fully nonlinear description of the transition mediated by the edge state. In order to understand the physical mechanisms behind this process, we measure the turbulent kinetic energy production and dissipation rates as a function of the radial coordinate. Our main observation is that the transition to turbulence relies on the energy amplification away from the wall, as opposed to the turbulence itself, whose energy is predominantly produced near the wall. This observation is further supported by the similar analyses on the minimal seeds and the edge states. Furthermore, we show that the time evolution of production-over-dissipation curves provides a clear distinction between the different initial amplification stages of the transition to turbulence from the minimal seed. AU - Budanur, Nazmi B AU - Marensi, Elena AU - Willis, Ashley P. AU - Hof, Björn ID - 7534 IS - 2 JF - Physical Review Fluids SN - 2469-990X TI - Upper edge of chaos and the energetics of transition in pipe flow VL - 5 ER - TY - JOUR AB - We introduce “state space persistence analysis” for deducing the symbolic dynamics of time series data obtained from high-dimensional chaotic attractors. To this end, we adapt a topological data analysis technique known as persistent homology for the characterization of state space projections of chaotic trajectories and periodic orbits. By comparing the shapes along a chaotic trajectory to those of the periodic orbits, state space persistence analysis quantifies the shape similarity of chaotic trajectory segments and periodic orbits. We demonstrate the method by applying it to the three-dimensional Rössler system and a 30-dimensional discretization of the Kuramoto–Sivashinsky partial differential equation in (1+1) dimensions. One way of studying chaotic attractors systematically is through their symbolic dynamics, in which one partitions the state space into qualitatively different regions and assigns a symbol to each such region.1–3 This yields a “coarse-grained” state space of the system, which can then be reduced to a Markov chain encoding all possible transitions between the states of the system. While it is possible to obtain the symbolic dynamics of low-dimensional chaotic systems with standard tools such as Poincaré maps, when applied to high-dimensional systems such as turbulent flows, these tools alone are not sufficient to determine symbolic dynamics.4,5 In this paper, we develop “state space persistence analysis” and demonstrate that it can be utilized to infer the symbolic dynamics in very high-dimensional settings. AU - Yalniz, Gökhan AU - Budanur, Nazmi B ID - 7563 IS - 3 JF - Chaos SN - 1054-1500 TI - Inferring symbolic dynamics of chaotic flows from persistence VL - 30 ER -