A thin, evaporating sessile droplet with a pinned contact line containing inert particles is considered. In the limit in which the liquid flow decouples from the particle transport, we discuss the interplay between particle advection, diffusion and adsorption onto the solid substrate on which the droplet sits. We perform an asymptotic analysis in the physically relevant regime in which the Péclet number is large, i.e. ${\textit{Pe}}\gg 1$, so that advection dominates diffusion in the droplet except in a boundary layer near the contact line, and in which the ratio of the particle velocities due to substrate adsorption and diffusion is at most of order unity as ${\textit{Pe}}\rightarrow \infty$. We use the asymptotic model alongside numerical simulations to demonstrate that substrate adsorption leads to a different leading-order distribution of particle mass compared with cases with negligible substrate adsorption, with a significant reduction of the mass in the suspension – the nascent coffee ring reported in Moore et al. (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 920, 2021, A54). The redistribution leads to an extension of the validity of the dilute suspension assumption, albeit at the cost of breakdown due to the growth of the deposited layer, which are important considerations for future models that seek to accurately model the porous deposit regions.

Ionic surfactants are commonly employed to modify the rheological properties of fluids, particularly in terms of surface viscoelasticity. Concurrently, external electric fields can significantly impact the dynamics of liquid threads. A key question is how ionic surfactants affect the dynamic behaviour of threads in the presence of an electric field? To investigate this, a one-dimensional model of a liquid thread coated with surfactants within a radial electric field is established, employing the long-wave approximation. We systematically investigate the effects of dimensionless parameters associated with the surfactants, including surfactant concentration, dilatational Boussinesq number ${\textit{Bo}}_{\kappa \infty }$ and shear Boussinesq number ${\textit{Bo}}_{\mu \infty }$. The results indicate that increasing the surfactant concentration and the two Boussinesq numbers reduces both the maximum growth rate and the dominant wavenumber. In addition, both the electric field and surfactants mitigate the breakup of the liquid thread and the formation of satellite droplets. At low applied electric potentials, the surface viscosity induced by surfactants predominantly governs this suppression. Surface viscosity suppresses the formation of satellite droplets by maintaining the neck point at the centre of the liquid thread within a single disturbance wavelength. When the applied potential is high, the electric stress has two main effects: the external electric field exerts a normal pressure on the liquid thread surface, suppressing satellite droplet formation, while the internal electric field inhibits liquid drainage. Surface viscosity further stabilizes the system by suppressing flow dynamics during this process.

As a step towards realising a skin-friction drag reduction technique that scales favourably with Reynolds number, the impact of a synthetic jet on a turbulent boundary layer was explored through a study combining wind-tunnel measurements and large eddy simulations. The jet was ejected in the wall-normal direction through a rectangular slot whose spanwise dimension matched that of dominant large-scale structures in the logarithmic region to target structures of that size and smaller simultaneously. Local skin-friction reduction was observed at both $x/\delta =2$ and $x/\delta =5$ downstream of the orifice centreline, where $\delta$ is the boundary-layer thickness. At $x/\delta =2$, the skin-friction reduction was observed to be due to the synthetic-jet velocity deficit intersecting the wall. At $x/\delta =5$, evidence from the simulations and wind-tunnel measurements suggests that a weakening of wall-coherent velocity scales is primarily responsible for the skin-friction reduction. Local skin-friction reduction which scales favourably with Reynolds number may be achievable with the synthetic jet employed in this study. However, there are many technical hurdles to overcome to achieve net skin-friction drag reduction over the entire region of influence. For instance, regions of skin-friction increase were observed close to the orifice ($x/\delta \lt 2$) and downstream of the orifice edge due to the induced motion of synthetic-jet vortical structures. Additionally, a recirculation region was seen to form during expulsion, which has implications for pressure drag on non-planar surfaces.

The triadic interactions and nonlinear energy transfer are investigated in a subsonic turbulent jet at $Re = 450\,000$. The primary focus is on the role of these interactions in the formation and attenuation of streaky structures. To this end, we employ bispectral mode decomposition, a technique that extracts coherent structures associated with dominant triadic interactions. A strong triadic correlation is identified between Kelvin–Helmholtz (KH) wavepackets and streaks: interactions between counter-rotating KH waves generates streamwise vortices, which subsequently give rise to streaks through the lift-up mechanism. The most energetic streaks occur at azimuthal wavenumber $m = 2$, with the dominant contributing triad being $[m_1, m_2, m_3] = [1, 1, 2]$. The spectral energy budget reveals that the net effect of nonlinear triadic interactions is an energy loss from the streaks. As these streaks convect downstream, they engage in further nonlinear interactions with other frequencies, which drain their energy and ultimately lead to their attenuation. Further analysis identifies the dominant scales and direction of energy transfer across different spatial regions of the jet. While the turbulent jet exhibits a forward energy cascade in a global sense, the direction of energy transfer varies locally: in the shear layer near the nozzle exit, triadic interactions among smaller scales dominate, resulting in an inverse energy cascade, whereas farther downstream, beyond the end of the potential core, interactions among larger scales prevail, leading to a forward cascade.

Secondary flows induced by spanwise heterogeneous surface roughness play a crucial role in determining engineering-relevant metrics such as surface drag, convective heat transfer and the transport of airborne scalars. While much of the existing literature has focused on idealized configurations with regularly spaced roughness elements, real-world surfaces often feature irregularities, clustering and topographic complexity for which the secondary flow response remains poorly understood. Motivated by this gap, we investigate multicolumn roughness configurations that serve as a regularized analogue of roughness clustering. Using large-eddy simulations, we systematically examine secondary flows across a controlled set of configurations in which cluster density and local arrangement are varied in an idealized manner, and observe that these variations give rise to distinct secondary flow polarities. Through a focused parameter study, we identify the spanwise gap between the edge-most roughness elements of adjacent columns, normalized by the channel half-height ($s_a/H$), as a key geometric factor governing this polarity. In addition to analysing the time-averaged structure, we investigate how variations in polarity affect the instantaneous dynamics of secondary flows. Here, we find that the regions of high- and low-momentum fluid created by the secondary flows alternate in a chaotic, non-periodic manner over time. Further analysis of the vertical velocity signal shows that variability in vertical momentum transport is a persistent and intrinsic feature of secondary flow dynamics. Taken together, these findings provide a comprehensive picture of how the geometric arrangement of roughness elements governs both the mean structure and temporal behaviour of secondary flows.

A fully resolved numerical study was performed to investigate interfacial heat and mass transfer enhanced by the fully developed Rayleigh–Bénard–Marangoni instability in a relatively deep domain. The instability was triggered by evaporative cooling modelled by a constant surface heat flux. The latter allowed for temperature-induced variations in surface tension giving rise to Marangoni forces reinforcing the Rayleigh instability. Simulations were performed at a fixed Rayleigh number (${\textit{Ra}}_h$) and a variety of Marangoni numbers (${\textit{Ma}}_h$). In each simulation, scalar transport equations for heat and mass concentration at various Schmidt numbers (${\textit{Sc}}=16{-}200$) were solved simultaneously. Due to the fixed (warm) temperature prescribed at the bottom of the computational domain, large buoyant plumes emerged quasi-periodically both at the top and bottom. With increasing Marangoni number a decrease in the average convection cell size at the surface was observed, with a simultaneous improvement in near-surface mixing. The presence of high aspect ratio rectangular convection cell footprints was found to be characteristic for Marangoni-dominated flows. Due to the promotion of interfacial mass transfer by Marangoni forces, the power in the scaling of the mass transfer velocity, $K_{\!L}\!\propto\! \textit{Sc}^{-n}$, was found to decrease from $n=0.50$ at ${\textit{Ma}}_h=0$ to $\approx 0.438$ at ${\textit{Ma}}_h=13.21\times 10^5$. Finally, the existence of a buoyancy-dominated and a Marangoni-dominated regime was investigated in the context of the interfacial heat and mass transfer scaling as a function of ${\textit{Ma}}_h+\varepsilon {\textit{Ra}}_h$, where $\varepsilon$ is a small number determined empirically.