Motivated by turbulent drag reduction by minute concentrations of polymers we study the effects of minor viscosity contrasts on the stability of hydrodynamic flows. The key player is a localized region where fluctuations are produced by interactions with the mean flow (the "critical layer"). We show that a layer of weakly space-dependent viscosity placed near the critical layer has a very large...

Drag reduction by microbubbles is a promising engineering method for improving ship performance. A fundamental theory of the phenomenon is lacking, however, making actual design quite haphazard. We offer here a theory of drag reduction by microbubbles in the limit of very small bubbles, when the effect of the bubbles is mainly to normalize the density and the viscosity of the carrier fluid. The...

Direct numerical simulation of turbulent channel flow over a compliant surface has been performed to evaluate the friction drag reduction effect. It is found that a slight drag reduction is observed over a compliant surface. This observation indicates that drag reduction is possible using a compliant surface that is deformed passively by wall pressure fluctuation. A small wall displacement and ...

The objective of this paper is to examine the effectiveness of wall oscillation as a control scheme of drag reduction. Two flow configurations are considered: constant flow rate and constant mean pressure gradient. The Navier-Stokes equations are solved using Fourier-Chebyshev spectral methods and the oscillation in sinusoidal form is enforced on the walls through boundary conditions for the sp...

Even with the recent extensive study into superhydrophobic surfaces, the fabrication of such surfaces on the inside walls of a pipe remains challenging. In this work we report a convenient bi-layered pipe design using a thin superhydrophobic metallic mesh formed into a tube, supported inside another pipe. A flow system was constructed to test the fabricated bi-layer pipeline, which allowed for ...

A model is described which explains drag reduction (DR) in dilute polymer solutions in terms of solvation of macromolecular chains and formation of relatively stable domains. The domains partly suppress the vortex formation, act as energy sinks, and also play a role in mechanical degradation in flow (MDF). We report ultrasonically determined solvation numbers for a series of copolymers with the...

Flexible polymers in dilute solution enhance the viscosity in slow flows. But in strong, rapidly varying, shear fields, they behave elastically. A turbulent cascade (from large to small scales) should thus be deeply modified when the elastic stresses become comparable to the Reynold's stress. A (tentative) scaling picture for these effects has been proposed by M. Tabor and the present author1):...

We demonstrate and quantify a highly effective drag reduction technique that exploits the Leidenfrost effect to create a continuous and robust lubricating vapor layer on the surface of a heated solid sphere moving in a liquid. Using high-speed video, we show that such vapor layers can reduce the hydrodynamic drag by over 85%. These results appear to approach the ultimate limit of drag reduction...