Seminars

Polymer additives are well known to reduce skin-friction drag in turbulent wall-bounded flows and have been implemented in large-scale systems such as the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. However, conventional approaches rely on uniform injection, which is fundamentally inefficient — distributing polymers blindly rather than where they are most dynamically effective. This motivates the need for targeted polymer delivery, where the location of injection is informed by the flow physics.
To isolate and understand the dominant physical mechanisms, we first simplify the problem to a two-dimensional setting, studying the interaction between a Lamb–Oseen vortex — an idealized 2D slice of a 3D vortex — and a Gaussian-distributed polymer concentration. A simplified targeting model is employed to quantify how localized polymer deposition influences the decay and disruption of the vortex.
Across a range of nondimensional parameters, we observe that polymer targeting based on instantaneous flow features is significantly more efficient at modifying the flow than traditional uniform injection. These results establish a physics-informed framework that bridges fundamental fluid–polymer interaction with practical, sustainable strategies for turbulence control and drag reduction.