Subcritical transition to turbulence of a precessing flow in a cylindrical vessel


Subcritical transition to turbulence of a precessing flow in a cylindrical vessel

Herault, J.; Gundrum, T.; Giesecke, A.; Stefani, F.

The transition to turbulence in a precessing cylindrical vessel is experimentally investigated. Our measurements are performed for a nearly resonant configuration with an initially laminar flow dominated by an inertial mode with azimuthal wave number m = 1 superimposed on a solid body rotation. By increasing the precession ratio, we observe a transition from the laminar to a non-linear regime, which then breakdowns to turbulence for larger precession ratio. Our measurements show that the transition to turbulence is subcritical, with a discontinuity of the wall-pressure and the power consumption at the threshold ϵLT. The turbulence is self-sustained below this threshold, describing a bifurcation diagram with a hysteresis. In this range of the control parameters, the turbulent flows can suddenly collapse after a finite duration, leading to a definitive relaminarization of the flow. The average lifetime 〈τ〉 of the turbulence increases rapidly when ϵ tends to ϵLT.

Keywords: DRESDYN; precession; turbulence; transition; bifurcation

Permalink: https://www.hzdr.de/publications/Publ-22975
Publ.-Id: 22975