Resistance reduction in pulsating turbulent pipe flows

The paper describes the effects of forced harmonic oscillations of fixed frequency and amplitudes in the range Λ = U-m/U-b = 1-11 on the characteristics of a turbulent pipe flow with a bulk Reynolds number of 5900. The resulting Stokes layer δ is a fraction of the pipe radius (χ=R/δ =53) so that the vorticity associated to the oscillating motion is generated in a small near wall region. The analysis is carried out processing a set of statistically independent samples obtained from wall-resolved large eddy simulations (LES); time and space averaged global quantities, extracted for the sake of comparison with recent experimental data, confirm the presence of a non-negligible drag reduction phenomenon. Phase averaged profiles of the Reynolds stress tensor components provide valuable material for the comprehension of the effects of the time varying mean shear upon the near wall turbulent flow structures. The large scales of motion are directly computed through numerical integration of the space filtered three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations with a spectrally accurate code; the subgrid scale terms are parametrized with a dynamic procedure.