NUS Graduate School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering

Research Project Write-up

Title of Project :

Delaying laminar-to-turbulent transition by flexible coatings

Name of Supervisor :

YEO Khoon Seng

Contact Details:

Tel: 6516-2246, E-mail: mpeyeoks@nus.edu.sg

Short Description
Fluid drag is responsible in one way or another for a large part of energy consumption
or losses in modern transportation systems from airplanes to motor vehicles, ships and
trains. One of the approaches to drag reduction is to suppress turbulent flow because
turbulent fluctuations facilitate the transfer of momentum and hence energy from a
moving body to the surrounding fluid. This loss of energy to the fluid manifests as a
drag force on the moving body. By keeping the boundary fluid layer laminar (free
from fluctuations), drag can be greatly reduced. This approach to reducing drag is
applicable to streamlined bodies, which most high speed traveling crafts are designed
to be.
The fluid layer adjacent to a moving body has a natural tendency to become turbulent
when disturbed. To achieve drag reduction here, one has to suppress this tendency for
transition from laminar to turbulent flow, i.e. to keep the laminar flow stable to small
disturbances. In a recent work the present PI found that finite-length compliant panels
are able to do this. Using a series of up to three short flexible panels, our direct
numerical simulation model shows that the appearance turbulent spots (representative
of the onset of turbulent flow) is delayed to more than twice the onset distance on a
rigid surface. The character of the suppressed disturbance spot is also greatly
modified by the intervention of the compliant panels. Importantly, flexible or
compliant panels offer a passive method (zero energy cost) for delaying transition and
hence of reducing drag.
The principal objectives of the present study are as follows:
To obtain a deeper understanding of the physics of the transition process
To study how the laminar-turbulent transition can be further delayed by
optimizing the properties of the flexible panels to the local flow properties
To investigate the effects of disturbance size on the transition process
To investigate the stabilizing effects of compliant panels on streaming white
noise sources, as opposed to intermittent disturbances.