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Life stages of wall-bounded decay of Taylor-Couette turbulence

Rodolfo Ostilla-Mónico1,*, Xiaojue Zhu2, Vamsi Spandan2, Roberto Verzicco2,3, and Detlef Lohse2,4

  • 1School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA
  • 2Physics of Fluids Group, Faculty of Science and Technology, MESA+ Research Institute, and J. M. Burgers Centre for Fluid Dynamics, University of Twente, P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands
  • 3Dipartimento di Ingegneria Industriale, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Via del Politecnico 1, Roma 00133, Italy
  • 4Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organisation, 37077 Göttingen, Germany

  • *rostilla@central.uh.edu
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Phys. Rev. Fluids 2, 114601 – Published 1 November, 2017

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevFluids.2.114601

Abstract

The decay of Taylor-Couette turbulence, i.e., the flow between two coaxial and independently rotating cylinders, is numerically studied by instantaneously stopping the forcing from an initially statistically stationary flow field at a Reynolds number of Re=3.5×104. The effect of wall friction is analyzed by comparing three separate cases, in which the cylinders are either suddenly made no-slip or stress-free. Different life stages are observed during the decay. In the first stage, the decay is dominated by large-scale rolls. Counterintuitively, when these rolls fade away, if the flow inertia is small a redistribution of energy occurs and the energy of the azimuthal velocity behaves nonmonotonically, first decreasing by almost two orders of magnitude and then increasing during the redistribution. The second stage is dominated by non-normal transient growth of perturbations in the axial (spanwise) direction. Once this mechanism is exhausted, the flow enters the final life stage, viscous decay, which is dominated by wall friction. We show that this stage can be modeled by a one-dimensional heat equation, and that self-similar velocity profiles collapse onto the theoretical solution.

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Phys. Rev. Fluids 2, 114601– Published 1 November, 2017
  • Received 22 April 2017
Article part of CHORUS

©2017 American Physical Society

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