Two sets of measurements utilizing hot-wire anemometry and oil-film interferometry for flat-plate turbulent boundary layers, exposed to various controlled adverse and favourable pressure gradients, are used to evaluate history effects of the imposed and varying free-stream gradients. The results are from the NDF wind tunnel at Illinois Tech (IIT) and the MTL wind tunnel at KTH, over the range $800 < Re_\tau < 22\,000$ (where $Re_{\tau }$ is the friction Reynolds number). The streamwise pressure-gradient parameter $\beta \equiv (-\ell /\tau _{w}) \cdot (\partial P_{e}/\partial x)$ varied between $-2 < \beta < 7$, where $\ell$ is an outer length scale for boundary layers equivalent to the half-height of channel flow and the radius of pipe flow, and is estimated for each boundary-layer profile; note that $\tau_w$ is the wall-shear stress and $P_e$ is the free-stream static pressure. Extracting from each profile the three parameters of the overlap region, following the recent work of Monkewitz & Nagib (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 967, 2023, p. A15) that led to an overlap region of combined logarithmic and linear parts, we find minimum history effects in the overlap region. Thus, the overlap region in this range of pressure-gradient boundary layers appears to be in ‘quasiequilibrium’.

Three-dimensional effects of sidewalls on the low-frequency unsteadiness of the shock-wave/boundary-layer interaction (SBLI) are of academic and practical importance but not yet well understood. Considerable attention has been paid to the viscous effect of sidewalls, whereas the potential inviscid confinement effect of sidewalls has received little attention. The present work provides experimental evidence of multiscale spanwise travelling waves crossing the separation front under the confinement of sidewalls. Global pressure measurements were made for a sidewall-confined 24$^\circ$ compression ramp interaction in Mach-2.83 flow using fast-responding pressure-sensitive paint. The unsteady pressure in a statistically two-dimensional intermittent region suggests that in addition to the canonical streamwise oscillation, the separation front exhibits significant low-frequency, multiscale spanwise distortion. Modal analysis further reveals that multiscale spanwise unsteadiness has higher intensity and frequency than the streamwise oscillation. Such strong spanwise unsteadiness calls attention to the low-frequency unsteadiness in previous sidewall-confined SBLI experiments and encourages further study on the mechanism of the confinement effect.

Richtmyer–Meshkov (RM) instability at a single-mode interface impacted by a cylindrical divergent shock with low to moderate Mach numbers is investigated experimentally. The motion of an unperturbed interface is first examined to obtain the background flow. The shocked interface moves uniformly at the early stage, but later decelerates. The stronger the incident shock, the larger the interface deceleration, which is reasonably predicted by a one-dimensional model considering the effect of postshock non-uniformity. Such a deceleration greatly inhibits the growths of harmonics of an initially perturbed interface and, consequently, the divergent RM instability presents very weak nonlinearity from early to late stages. Particularly, higher-Mach-number cases present weaker nonlinearity due to larger deceleration there. This abnormal linear growth regime is reported for the first time. Benefiting from this, the incompressible linear model holds validity at all stages of divergent RM instability. It is also found that compressibility inhibits the initial growth rate, but produces a weak influence on the subsequent instability growth.

This paper reports on the efficacy of the Görtler number in scaling the laminar-turbulent boundary-layer transition on rotating cones facing axial inflow. Depending on the half-cone angle $\psi$ and axial flow strength, the competing centrifugal and cross-flow instabilities dominate the transition. Traditionally, the flow is evaluated by using two parameters: the local meridional Reynolds number $Re_l$ comparing the inertial versus viscous effects and the local rotational speed ratio $S$ accounting for the boundary-layer skew. We focus on the centrifugal effects, and evaluate the flow fields and reported transition points using Görtler number based on the azimuthal momentum thickness of the similarity solution and local cone radius. The results show that Görtler number alone dominates the late stages of transition (maximum amplification and turbulence onset phases) for a wide range of investigated $S$ and half-cone angle ($15^{\circ } \leq \psi \leq 50^{\circ }$), although the early stage (critical phase) seems to be not determined by the Görtler number alone on the broader cones ($\psi =30^{\circ }$ and $50^{\circ }$) where the primary cross-flow instability dominates the flow. Overall, this indicates that the centrifugal effects play an important role in the boundary-layer transition on rotating cones in axial inflow.

An additional distant wall is known to highly alter the jetting scenarios of wall-proximal bubbles. Here, we combine high-speed photography and axisymmetric volume of fluid (VoF) simulations to quantitatively describe its role in enhancing the micro-jet dynamics within the directed jet regime (Zeng et al., J. Fluid Mech., vol. 896, 2020, A28). Upon a favourable agreement on the bubble and micro-jet dynamics, both experimental and simulation results indicate that the micro-jet velocity increases dramatically as $\eta$ decreases, where $\eta =H/R_{max}$ is the distance between two walls $H$ normalized by the maximum bubble radius $R_{max}$. The mechanism is related to the collapsing flow, which is constrained by the distant wall into a reverse stagnation-point flow that builds up pressure near the bubble's top surface and accelerates it into micro-jets. We further derive an equation expressing the micro-jet velocity $U_{jet}=87.94\gamma ^{0.5}(1+(1/3)(\eta -\lambda ^{1.2})^{-2})$, where ${\gamma =d/R_{max}}$ is the stand-off distance to the proximal wall with $d$ the distance between the initial bubble centre and the wall, $\lambda =R_{y,m}/R_{max}$ with $R_{y,m}$ the distance between the top surface and the proximal wall at the bubble's maximum expansion. Viscosity has a minimal impact on the jet velocity for small $\gamma$, where the pressure buildup is predominantly influenced by geometry.

Polymer chains in turbulent flows are generally modelled as dumbbells, i.e. two beads joined by a nonlinear spring. The dumbbell only maps a single spatial configuration, described by the polymer end-to-end vector, thus a multi-bead FENE (finitely extensible nonlinear elastic) chain seems a natural improvement for a more accurate characterisation of the polymer spatial conformation. At a large Weissenberg number, a comparison with the more accurate Kuhn chain reveals that the multi-bead FENE chain drastically overestimates the probability of folded configurations. Surprisingly, the dumbbell turns out to be the only meaningful bead-spring model to coarse-grain a polymer macromolecule in turbulent pipe flows.

We develop a mean-field model to examine the stability of a ‘quasi-2-D suspension’ of elongated particles embedded within a viscous membrane. This geometry represents several biological and synthetic settings, and we reveal mechanisms by which the anisotropic mobility of particles interacts with long-ranged viscous membrane hydrodynamics. We first show that a system of slender rod-like particles driven by a constant force is unstable to perturbations in concentration – much like sedimentation in analogous 3-D suspensions – so long as membrane viscous stresses dominate. However, increasing the contribution of viscous stresses from the surrounding 3-D fluid(s) suppresses such an instability. We then tie this result to the hydrodynamic disturbances generated by each particle in the plane of the membrane and show that enhancing subphase viscous contributions generates extensional fields that orient neighbouring particles in a manner that draws them apart. The balance of flux of particles aggregating versus separating then leads to a wave number selection in the mean-field model.

A general rethinking of the mathematical foundations of water surface waves from the perspective of the Hilbert transform uncovers shortcomings of the standard multiple-scale approach as well as elucidates the interplay of non-local and dispersive effects. Application of the Hilbert transforms to planar and cylindrical settings allows us to deduce new weakly nonlinear models, including an alternative to Zakharov's equation and an envelope equation for cylindrical waves on deep water, as well as to highlight the crucial differences between these geometries.

Applying a variational analysis, a minimum-enstrophy vortex in three-dimensional (3-D) fluids with continuous stratification is found, under the quasi-geostrophic hypothesis. The buoyancy frequency is held constant. This vortex is an ideal limiting state in a flow with an enstrophy decay while energy and generalized angular momentum remain fixed. The variational method used to obtain two-dimensional (2-D) minimum-enstrophy vortices is applied here to 3-D integral quantities. The solution from the first-order variation is expanded on a basis of orthogonal spherical Bessel functions. By computing second-order variations, the solution is found to be a true minimum in enstrophy. This solution is weakly unstable when inserted in a numerical code of the quasi-geostrophic equations. After a stage of linear instability, nonlinear wave interaction leads to the reorganization of this vortex into a tripolar vortex. Further work will relate our solution with maximal entropy 3-D vortices.

The validity of the Oberbeck–Boussinesq (OB) approximation in Rayleigh–Bénard (RB) convection is studied using the Gray & Giorgini (Intl J. Heat Mass Transfer, vol. 19, 1976, pp. 545–551) criterion that requires that the residuals, i.e. the terms that distinguish the full governing equations from their OB approximations, are kept below a certain small threshold $\hat {\sigma }$. This gives constraints on the temperature and pressure variations of the fluid properties (density, absolute viscosity, specific heat at constant pressure $c_p$, thermal expansion coefficient and thermal conductivity) and on the magnitudes of the pressure work and viscous dissipation terms in the heat equation, which all can be formulated as bounds regarding the maximum temperature difference in the system, $\varDelta$, and the container height, $L$. Thus for any given fluid and $\hat {\sigma }$, one can calculate the OB-validity region (in terms of $\varDelta$ and $L$) and also the maximum achievable Rayleigh number ${{Ra}}_{max,\hat {\sigma }}$, and we did so for fluids water, air, helium and pressurized SF$_6$ at room temperature, and cryogenic helium, for $\hat {\sigma }=5\,\%$, $10\,\%$ and $20\,\%$. For the most popular fluids in high-${{Ra}}$ RB measurements, which are cryogenic helium and pressurized SF$_6$, we have identified the most critical residual, which is associated with the temperature dependence of $c_p$. Our direct numerical simulations (DNS) showed, however, that even when the values of $c_p$ can differ almost twice within the convection cell, this feature alone cannot explain a sudden and strong enhancement in the heat transport in the system, compared with its OB analogue.

Equations relating the pressure at a horizontal seabed, the free-surface profile and the surface pressure are derived for two-dimensional irrotational steady water waves with arbitrary pressure at the free surface. Special cases include gravity, capillary, flexural and wind waves. Without approximations, we show that the free-surface recovery from the bottom pressure requires the resolution of only one first-order ordinary differential equation independent of the surface pressure, thus providing a new general recovery method valid for a broad class of water waves. Another equation provides an explicit expression for the surface pressure as a function of the bottom pressure and of the free surface. Thus, if unknown, the surface pressure can also be recovered if one extra measurement is available. This new recovery procedure is illustrated analytically for the linear approximation of a flexural–capillary–gravity wave, and numerically for fully nonlinear capillary–gravity waves.

The aeroacoustics of a boundary layer ingesting (BLI) ducted fan is investigated experimentally. The study examines a ducted fan immersed in an adverse streamwise pressure gradient turbulent boundary layer developed over a curved wall. Aeroacoustics measurements indicate that the noise from the BLI ducted fan results from a complex interaction among the fan, duct and the incoming boundary layer. The fundamental mechanisms of noise generation are explained using a general source separation strategy. A detailed noise comparison is made at varying fan rotational speeds and across a wide range of axial inflow velocities. In a low thrust regime, the noise is found to be driven by the fan loading, coupled with duct acoustics and the haystacking phenomenon. In a high thrust regime, the contribution from duct acoustics diminishes, and the noise is predominantly driven by the fan loading coupled with the haystacking phenomenon.

The accurate simulation of complex dynamics in fluid flows demands a substantial number of degrees of freedom, i.e. a high-dimensional state space. Nevertheless, the swift attenuation of small-scale perturbations due to viscous diffusion permits in principle the representation of these flows using a significantly reduced dimensionality. Over time, the dynamics of such flows evolves towards a finite-dimensional invariant manifold. Using only data from direct numerical simulations, in the present work we identify the manifold and determine evolution equations for the dynamics on it. We use an advanced autoencoder framework to automatically estimate the intrinsic dimension of the manifold and provide an orthogonal coordinate system. Then, we learn the dynamics by determining an equation on the manifold by using both a function-space approach (approximating the Koopman operator) and a state-space approach (approximating the vector field on the manifold). We apply this method to exact coherent states for Kolmogorov flow and minimal flow unit pipe flow. Fully resolved simulations for these cases require $O(10^3)$ and $O(10^5)$ degrees of freedom, respectively, and we build models with two or three degrees of freedom that faithfully capture the dynamics of these flows. For these examples, both the state-space and function-space time evaluations provide highly accurate predictions of the long-time dynamics in manifold coordinates.

We explore the transition to chaos in a prototypical hydrodynamic oscillator, namely a globally unstable low-density jet subjected to external time-periodic forcing. As the forcing strengthens at an off-resonant frequency, we find that the jet exhibits a sequence of nonlinear states: period-1 limit cycle $\rightarrow $ quasiperiodicity $\rightarrow$ intermittency $\rightarrow$ low-dimensional chaos. We show that the intermittency obeys type-II Pomeau–Manneville dynamics by analysing the first return map and the scaling properties of the quasiperiodic lifetimes between successive chaotic epochs. By providing experimental evidence of the type-II intermittency route to chaos in a globally unstable jet, this study reinforces the idea that strange attractors emerge via universal mechanisms in open self-excited flows, facilitating the development of instability control strategies based on chaos theory.

The study investigates the impact of a vertically layered bathymetry, consisting of submerged vertical plates, on a ship wake through theoretical analysis and experimental realization. For subwavelength distances between the plates, the analysis relies on a homogenized model that provides an effective, anisotropic, dispersion relation for the propagation of water waves. Our findings reveal that a highly asymmetric wake can be achieved, with the degree of asymmetry contingent upon the ship propagation direction in relation to the plate orientation. This anisotropy is characterized with respect to water depth and to ship length using the dimensionless depth and hull Froude numbers. Laboratory experiments align closely with theoretical predictions, confirming that the asymmetry of the wake can indeed be managed through manipulation of bathymetric conditions.

Nonlinear machine learning for turbulent flows can exhibit robust performance even outside the range of training data. This is achieved when machine-learning models can accommodate scale-invariant characteristics of turbulent flow structures. This study presents a data-driven approach to reveal scale-invariant vortical structures across Reynolds numbers that provide insights for supporting nonlinear machine-learning-based studies of turbulent flows. To uncover conditions for which nonlinear models are likely to perform well, we use a Buckingham-Pi-based sparse nonlinear scaling to find the influence of the Pi groups on the turbulent flow data. We consider nonlinear scalings of the invariants of the velocity gradient tensor for an example of three-dimensional decaying isotropic turbulence. The present scaling not only enables the identification of vortical structures that are interpolatory and extrapolatory for the given flow field data but also captures non-equilibrium effects of the energy cascade. As a demonstration, the present findings are applied to machine-learning-based super-resolution analysis of three-dimensional isotropic turbulence. We show that machine-learning models reconstruct vortical structures well in the interpolatory space with reduced performance in the extrapolatory space revealed by the nonlinearly scaled invariants. The present approach enables us to depart from labelling turbulent flow data with a single parameter of Reynolds number and comprehensively examine the flow field to support training and testing of nonlinear machine-learning techniques.

The nexus between turbulence, particle interaction and interfacial tension is virtually unexplored, despite being highly relevant to a wealth of industrial and environmental settings. Here we investigate it by conducting experiments on non-Brownian spherical particles at the interface of turbulent liquid layers. The latter are electromagnetically stirred in a quasi-two-dimensional apparatus, while the particles are individually tracked. By systematically varying interfacial conditions, turbulence intensity, particle size and concentration from dilute to dense, we map the system behaviour over a wide parameter space. We reveal how the dynamics is governed by the balance of drag, capillarity and lubrication. Based on their scaling, we propose a phase diagram comprising three distinct regimes, characterized by widely different levels of clustering and fluctuating energy of the particles. This is quantitatively confirmed by the experimental results.

We introduce a numerical strategy to study the evolution of two-dimensional water waves in the presence of a plunging jet. The free-surface Navier–Stokes solution is obtained with a finite, but small, viscosity. We observe the formation of a surface boundary layer where the vorticity is localised. We highlight convergence to the inviscid solution. The effects of dissipation on the development of a singularity at the tip of the wave is also investigated by characterising the vorticity boundary layer appearing near the interface.

The presence of a dispersed phase can significantly modulate the drag in turbulent systems. We derived a conserved quantity that characterizes the radial transport of azimuthal momentum in the fluid–fluid two-phase Taylor–Couette turbulence. This quantity consists of contributions from advection, diffusion and two-phase interface, which are closely related to density, viscosity and interfacial tension, respectively. We found from interface-resolved direct numerical simulations that the presence of the two-phase interface consistently produces a positive contribution to the momentum transport and leads to drag enhancement, while decreasing the density and viscosity ratios of the dispersed phase to the continuous phase reduces the contribution of local advection and diffusion terms to the momentum transport, respectively, resulting in drag reduction. Therefore, we concluded that the decreased density ratio and the decreased viscosity ratio work together to compete with the presence of a two-phase interface for achieving drag modulation in fluid–fluid two-phase turbulence.

Compressible direct numerical simulations are employed to elucidate the low-wavenumber behaviour of wall-pressure fluctuations in turbulent channel flow and the effect of flow Mach number in the nearly incompressible regime. Simulations are conducted at bulk Mach numbers 0.4, 0.2 and 0.1, and friction Reynolds number 180. In addition to the convective ridge that is virtually Mach-number-independent, acoustic ridges, whose magnitudes are orders of magnitude lower, are identified in the two-dimensional wavenumber–frequency spectrum. At lower frequencies, the acoustic ridges represent propagating longitudinal and oblique waves that match the theoretical predictions of two-dimensional duct modes with a uniform mean flow. They decay with decreasing Mach number but remain distinctly identifiable even at Mach 0.1. At high frequencies, in contrast, no propagating waves are found, and the spectral level in the supersonic wavenumber range is broadly elevated and increases with decreasing Mach number.