Drag reduction by polymer additives in decaying turbulence

Abstract

We present results from a systematic numerical study of decaying turbulence in a dilute polymer solution by using a shell-model version of the finitely extensible nonlinear elastic and Peterlin equations. Our study leads to an appealing definition of the drag reduction for the case of decaying turbulence. We exhibit several new results, such as the potential-energy spectrum of the polymer, hitherto unobserved features in the temporal evolution of the kinetic-energy spectrum, and characterize intermittency in such systems. We compare our results with the Gledzer-Ohkitani-Yamada shell model for fluid turbulence.