Organic and inorganic flocculants are used in treatment of water and industrial effluents. Polymeric flocculants, synthetic as well as natural, because of their natural inertness to PH changes, low dosage, and easy handling, have become very popular in industrial effluent treatment. It has been established in the authors' laboratory that by grafting polyacrylamide branches on rigid backbone of polysaccharides, the dangling grafted chains have easy approachability to contaminants in effluents. Thus grafted polysaccharides are very efficient, shear stable and biodegradable flocculants. They also exhibit turbulent drag reducing characteristics. Among grafted guar gum, xanthan gum, carboxymethyl cellulose, and starch, grafted starch performs the best. Starch consists of amylose (a low molecular weight linear polymer) and amylopectin (a high molecular weight, branched polymer). The grafted amylopectin is found to be the best flocculant for various kinds of industrial effluents, providing credibility to the above‐cited model. In the present paper, the details about grafted polysaccharides as turbulent drag reducers and flocculants are given, along with their applications.

In this paper, we consider the evolution of decaying homogeneous anisotropic turbulence without mean velocity gradients, where only the slow pressure rate of strain is nonzero. A higher degree nonlinear return-to-isotropy model has been developed for the slow pressure–strain correlation, considering anisotropies in Reynolds stress, dissipation rate, and length scale tensor. Assumption of single length scale across the flow is not sufficient, from which stems the introduction of length scale anisotropy tensor, which has been assumed to be a linear function of Reynolds stress and dissipation tensor. The present model with anisotropy in length scale shows better agreement with well-accepted experimental results and an improvement over the Sarkar and Speziale (SS) quadratic model.

Autonomous underwater vehicles play an essential role in geophysical data collection, deep water mining, seafloor mapping, ocean exploration, and in many other related activities starting from military to scientific applications. A detailed understanding of hydrodynamic characteristics will lead to better design, better control, and optimal path planning of autonomous underwater vehicles in the deepest corner of oceans. This article will provide a detailed review of the hydrodynamic characteristics of autonomous underwater vehicles, starting from different experimental techniques used in the analysis of hydrodynamic parameters, methods used for fixing the autonomous underwater vehicles in towing tank, instruments used for measurement of the hydrodynamic parameters. Furthermore, numerical methods employed in performing computational analysis, hydrodynamics-based shape optimization, studies on drag reduction, and finally a detailed list of turbulence models used in the computational fluid dynamics–related numerical simulations. The hydrodynamics-based optimal shape of the autonomous underwater vehicles, the best technique to predict the hydrodynamic parameters, and the best turbulence model for the computational fluid dynamics–based prediction of hydrodynamic parameters will be recommended. At last, the hydrodynamic characteristics of different bio-inspired autonomous underwater vehicles are discussed.

In the presence of mean strain or rotation, the anisotropy of turbulence increases due to the rapid pressure strain term. In this paper, we consider the modeling of the rapid pressure strain correlation of turbulence. The anisotropy of turbulence in the presence of mean strain is studied and a new model is formulated by calibrating the model constants at the rapid distortion limit. This model is tested for a range of plane strain and elliptic flows and compared to direct numerical simulation (DNS) results. The present model shows agreement with DNS and improvements over the earlier models like those by Launder et al. (1975, “Progress in the Development of a Reynolds-Stress Turbulence Closure,” J. Fluid Mech., 68(3), pp. 537–566.) and Speziale et al. (1991, “Modelling the Pressure–Strain Correlation of Turbulence: An Invariant Dynamical Systems Approach,” J. Fluid Mech., 227(1), pp. 245–272.) that have been reported to give satisfactory performance for hyperbolic flows but not satisfactory for elliptic flows.

This article presents experimental and numerical studies on the effect of free stream turbulence on evolution of flow over an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) hull form at three Reynolds numbers with different submergence depths and angles of attack. The experiments were conducted in a recirculating water tank and the instantaneous velocity profiles were recorded along the AUV using Acoustic Doppler Velocimetry (ADV). The experimental results of stream-wise mean velocity, turbulent kinetic energy(TKE) and Reynolds stresses were used to validate the predictive capability of a Reynolds stress model (RSM) with the wall reflection term of the pressure strain correlation. From the high fidelity RSM based simulations it is observed that in presence of free stream turbulence, the pressure, skin friction, drag and lift coefficients decrease on the AUV hull.The variation of the hydrodynamic coefficients were also plotted along the AUV hull for different values of submergence depth and angle of attack with different levels of free stream turbulence. The conclusions from this experimental and numerical investigation give guidance for improved design paradigms for the design of AUVs.