67th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics (November 23, 2014 — November 25, 2014)
P0006: Taylor's Forest
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/APS.DFD.2014.GFM.P0006
Turbulence is present in everyday life as well as in most of industrial applications. Nevertheless, despite more than one century of work, the transition to turbulence remains one of the most intriguing unsolved problem in fluid dynamics.
Although turbulence surrounds us almost everywhere, it is difficult to visualize it. In order to tackle this issue, we seeded the water used in the experiment with aluminium flakes. Then, recording the flow with an high speed camera, turbulent regions appear darker than laminar ones.
The picture represents a spatio-temporal view of the flow between two concentric cylinders where only the outer one is rotating. In this regime, when turbulence first arises, it is spatio temporally intermittent. Laminar and turbulent regions co exist and compete, yet neither of them can overcome the other. By quantifying the turbulent fraction and the shape of turbulent areas, we can describe the transition with statistical physics models.
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