Interaction of Elasto-inertial Turbulence and material microstructure – INTER-ET

Transport and handling of complex fluids is an important contributor to World energy consumption (10% is estimated to come from pumping suspensions), and improving their mixing and heat transfer is a key for new applications from process industry to medicine.

A tiny amount of polymers, making the fluid viscoelastic, can completely change its flow, reducing turbulent friction and pumping power by around 70 % at large scales, but creating a whole new kind of turbulence at small scales.

Elastic turbulence has recently received exponentially increasing attention, as a promising way to increase mixing and heat transfer at small scales (e.g. lab-on-a-chip applications), efficient cleaning and storage of fluids in the ground, but also as undesired source of chaotic flow paths and friction (cell sorting, blood flow).

However, large gaps exist in understanding elastic and elasto-inertial turbulence, between conflicting experiments and theories, and multiscale interactions needed to sustain it.The INTER-ET proposal will revolutionize the state-of-the-art understanding of elastic fluids turbulence and its interaction with material microstructure, by synergetic simulations and experiments that were impossible until now.

This will be achieved by our high-fidelity methods that for the first time enabled three-dimensional studies of elastoviscoplastic fluid turbulence, suspensions of tens of thousands of particles, and experimental time-resolved measurements on microscale.

Theories for Newtonian turbulence do not hold for elastic fluids, and there is an urgent need for improved theories and models in wall-bounded turbulence of complex fluids.

INTER-ET proposal aims to: i) perform the first simulations and experiments of EIT in matching wall-bounded geometries, ii) apply methods for direct experimental measurement of time-resolved stress fields and compare with simulations, iii) improve microscopic models and predictions of elastic instability and turbulence.