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Published on: August 19, 2015
Stretching and Buckling of Small Elastic Fibers in Turbulence
Sofía Allende1, Christophe Henry1, Jérémie Bec1
1Université Côte d'Azur, CNRS, OCA, Laboratoire J.-L. Lagrange, 06300 Nice, France.
Abstract:
Small flexible fibers in a turbulent flow are found to be as straight as stiff rods most of the time. This is due to the cooperative action of flexural rigidity and fluid stretching. However, fibers might bend and buckle when they tumble and experience a strong enough local compression. Such events are similar to an activation process, where the role of temperature is played by the inverse of Young's modulus. Numerical simulations show that buckling occurs very intermittently in time. This results from unexpected long-range Lagrangian correlations of the turbulent shear.
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