George Mason University – Investigations of Elastic Turbulence Phenomena Including Thermal Transport Effects

This research activity, involving Dr. Ligrani, is in collaboration with Professor Robert Handler, and associated graduate students, of George Mason University. Professor Handler recently undertook research as the Co-Principal Investigator (with Dr. Ligrani) on a Collaborative Research effort funded by the National Science Foundation in the area of thermal transport from elastic turbulence. Collaborative efforts involve investigations of physical phenomena, which are unique to elastic turbulence, using numerical predictions combined with experimental measurements. Current research efforts consider thermal transport and development of elastic instabilities in rotating Couette flow¹, and numerical predictions of the conversion of polymer elastic energy into kinetic energy and vorticity².

REFERENCES

¹ Thermal Transport of Viscoelastic Fluids Within Rotating Couette Flows (P. M. Ligrani, M. Su, A. Pippert, and R. A. Handler), AIAA Journal of Thermophysics and Heat Transfer, Vol. 34, No. 1, pp. 121-133, January 2020.

² Vortex Generation in a Finitely Extensible Nonlinear Elastic Peterlin Fluid Initially at Rest (R. A. Handler, E. Blaisten-Barojas, P. M. Ligrani, P. Dong, and M. Paige), Engineering Reports, Vol. 2, No. 3, pp. 1-17, March 2020.