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Effects of Polymer Additive on Turbulent Bulk Flow: The Polymer Concentration Dependence

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Mechanical Engineering ((LNME))

Abstract

We report an experimental study of the effects of polymer additives on the turbulent bulk flow. Our results confirm that both the acceleration fluctuation a and the velocity fluctuation u of the flow are suppressed when the polymer additives are present and the suppression effect on a is much stronger. We further found that polymer additives enhance the anisotropy of the flow at small scales, but do not affect the anisotropy at large scale very much. These results are qualitatively in agreement with a recent theory which predicts that only scales smaller than a critical scale are affected by the polymer additives.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the Max Planck Society and the Deutsche Forschungs-gemeinschaft (through grant XU91-3) for their support. H.D. Xi also thanks the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for the generous support.

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Correspondence to Heng-Dong Xi .

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© 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Xi, HD., Xu, H., Bodenschatz, E. (2014). Effects of Polymer Additive on Turbulent Bulk Flow: The Polymer Concentration Dependence. In: Zhou, Y., Liu, Y., Huang, L., Hodges, D. (eds) Fluid-Structure-Sound Interactions and Control. Lecture Notes in Mechanical Engineering. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40371-2_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40371-2_7

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-40370-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-40371-2

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