We investigate the effects of superhydrophobic surfaces (SHS) carrying streamwise grooves on the flow dynamics and the resultant drag reduction in a fully developed turbulent channel flow. The SHS is modelled as a flat boundary with alternating no-slip and free-slip conditions, and a series of direct numerical simulations is performed with systematically changing the spanwise periodicity of the streamwise grooves. In all computations, a constant pressure gradient condition is employed, so that the drag reduction effect is manifested by an increase of the bulk mean velocity. To capture the flow properties that are induced by the non-homogeneous boundary conditions the instantaneous turbulent flow is decomposed into the spatial-mean, coherent and random components. It is observed that the alternating no-slip and free-slip boundary conditions lead to the generation of Prandtl’s second kind of secondary flow characterized by coherent streamwise vortices. A mathematical relationship between the bulk mean velocity and different dynamical contributions, i.e. the effective slip length and additional turbulent losses over slip surfaces, reveals that the increase of the bulk mean velocity is mainly governed by the effective slip length. For a small spanwise periodicity of the streamwise grooves, the effective slip length in a turbulent flow agrees well with the analytical solution for laminar flows. Once the spanwise width of the free-slip area becomes larger than approximately 20 wall units, however, the effective slip length is significantly reduced from the laminar value due to the mixing caused by the underlying turbulence and secondary flow. Based on these results, we develop a simple model that allows estimating the gain due to a SHS in turbulent flows at practically high Reynolds numbers.

AbstractHarmonic oscillations of the walls of a turbulent plane channel flow are studied by direct numerical simulations to improve our understanding of the physical mechanism for skin-friction drag reduction. The simulations are carried out at constant pressure gradient in order to define an unambiguous inner scaling: in this case, drag reduction manifests itself as an increase of mass flow rate. Energy and enstrophy balances, carried out to emphasize the role of the oscillating spanwise shear layer, show that the viscous dissipation of the mean flow and of the turbulent fluctuations increase with the mass flow rate, and the relative importance of the latter decreases. We then focus on the turbulent enstrophy: through an analysis of the temporal evolution from the beginning of the wall motion, the dominant, oscillation-related term in the turbulent enstrophy is shown to cause the turbulent dissipation to be enhanced in absolute terms, before the slow drift towards the new quasi-equilibrium condition. This mechanism is found to be responsible for the increase in mass flow rate. We finally show that the time-average volume integral of the dominant term is linearly related to the drag reduction.

A wide range of applicability of the Reynolds analogy between turbulent momentum and heat transport implies inherent difficulty in diminishing or enhancing skin friction and heat transfer independently. In the present study, we introduce suboptimal control theory for achieving a dissimilar control of enhancing heat transfer, while keeping the skin friction not increased considerably in a fully developed channel flow. The Fréchet differentials clearly show that the responses of velocity and temperature fields to wall blowing/suction are quite different, due to the fact that the velocity is a divergence-free vector field while the temperature is a conservative scalar field. This essential difference allows us to achieve dissimilar control even in flows where the averaged momentum and energy transport equations have an identical form. It is also found that the resultant optimized mode of control input exhibits a streamwise travelling-wave-like property. By exploring the phase relationship between the travelling-wave-like control input and the velocity and thermal fields, we reveal that such control input contributes to dissimilar heat transfer enhancement via two different mechanisms, i.e. direct modification of the coherent components of the Reynolds shear stress and the turbulent heat flux, and indirect effects on the incoherent components, through modification of the mean velocity and temperature profiles. Based on these results, a simple open-loop strategy for dissimilar control is proposed and assessed.