A paper due to be published in the prestigious Europhysics Letters Journal (EPL) next month will contribute to, but not solve, a centuries-old scientific debate about turbulence, says co-author Dr. Francesco Fedele, an assistant professor of civil engineering and computer and electrical engineering.
The paper, “Vortexons in Axisymmetric Pipe Flows” explores fluid turbulence, a phenomenon that has prompted spirited scientific inquiry since the 15th century, when Leonardo da Vinci first contemplated arcs of falling water in a nearby fountain.
In the paper, Fedele and his co-author, University of Sovoie Researcher Dr. Denys Dutykh, seek to simplify the complex Navier-Stokes equations traditionally used to analyze fluid turbulence, using, instead, the so-called KdV/Camassa-Holm equations that can be easily solved or studied.
“Such equations revealed the existence of special coherent structures, named vortexons, which may play a role as a precursor to transition to turbulence,” says Fedele. “It’s ‘another hand on the elephant’” of this subject. More will be done.”
This paper, together with a pilot paper published last year, summarizes six years of Fedele’s research on the transition to turbulence, but it does not begin to extinguish his curiosity.
“Water appears as a disorganized motion of coherent structures, or just chaotic or turbulent,” he said.
“In reality, such a disordered motion occurs with order,
according to well-defined natural laws that can be mathematically described. Revealing the secrets of these equations is the unsolved problem of the millennium with a million dollar prize.”
Fedele says he and Dutykh next plan to expand their research by deriving simplified dynamical equations of a 3-D model to describe turbulence. Moreover, he plans to undertake experiments at Georgia Tech to validate the formulated theoretical model.
