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Introduction. Turbulence transition in pipe flow: 125th anniversary of the publication of Reynolds' paper
Bruno Eckhardt Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 2009 367, 449-455 doi: 10.1098/rsta.2008.0217

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Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A (2009) 367, 449455 doi:10.1098/rsta.2008.0217 Published online 5 November 2008

Introduction. Turbulence transition in pipe ow: 125th anniversary of the publication of Reynolds paper
B Y B RUNO E CKHARDT *
Fachbereich Physik, Philipps-Universitat Marburg, 35032 Marburg, Germany
The 125th anniversary of Osborne Reynolds seminal publication on the transition to turbulence in pipe ow offers an opportunity to survey our understanding of the nature of the transition. Dynamical systems concepts, computational methods and dedicated experiments have helped to elucidate some of Reynolds observations and to extract new quantitative characteristics of the transition. This introduction summarizes some of the developments and indicates how the various papers in this volume contribute to an improved understanding of Reynolds observations.
Keywords: pipe ow; turbulence; travelling wave

On 15 March 1883, Osborne Reynolds presented the results of An experimental investigation of the circumstances which determine whether the motion of water shall be direct or sinuous, and of the law of resistance in parallel channels to the Royal Society of London. It was rst published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society (Reynolds 1883a), followed by a longer account in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (Reynolds 1883b). The longer paper incorporates the brief one as I and contains comprehensive documentation of his experiments as well as the famous sketch of his experimental rig, which to this day is preserved at Manchester University. The historical probes into the archives of the Royal Society by Jackson & Launder (2007) showed that the referees were well aware of the signicance of the contribution: Lord Rayleigh observes that the paper records some well contrived experiments on a subject which has long needed investigation ., and Sir George Stokes emphasizes that Osborne Reynolds shows for the rst time that the distinction between regular and eddying motion depends on a relationship between the dimensions of space and velocity. That dimensionless relationship became later known as the Reynolds number (see von Karman (1954) and Rott (1990) for the historical developments). For ow in a pipe, the Reynolds number is usually based on the mean ow speed U, the diameter of the pipe d and the kinematic viscosity of the uid n,
*bruno.eckhardt@physik.uni-marburg.de One contribution of 10 to a Theme Issue Turbulence transition in pipe ow: 125th anniversary of the publication of Reynolds paper.

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Ud : 1:1 n In his fundamental contribution, Reynolds documents the key features of the turbulence transition in pipe ow as they have been reproduced in many experiments and student demonstrations since. From a modern perspective, his observations focus on three properties of the ow: there is a lower critical Reynolds number below which no turbulence is observed; an upper critical one above which the laminar ow can no longer be sustained; and a minimal amplitude which perturbations have to exceed in order to cause transition for intermediate Reynolds numbers. The puzzling aspects of this transition emerge when one tries to assign numbers to these phenomena. For the upper critical Reynolds number, above which the ow becomes turbulent owing to natural causes (i.e. by perturbations present in the system and not induced externally), he found values close to 13 000. Ekman (as quoted in Rott 1990) increased this to approximately 44 000 using Reynolds apparatus, and Pfenniger (1961) managed to keep the ow laminar up to 1 00 000. Together with the result from linear stability analysis that the parabolic prole remains linearly stable against innitesimal perturbations for all Reynolds numbers (Salwen et al. 1980; Schmid & Henningson 2001; Meseguer & Trefethen 2003), these observations suggest that transition occurs only when the perturbation exceeds a critical amplitude, and that the different values for natural transition are linked to the level of background uctuations and perturbations in the experiments. Some observations on this connection will be discussed below, but many aspects of it remain to be explored. A second puzzle concerns the values for the lower critical Reynolds number below which no turbulence can be induced, no matter how large a perturbation is added. The data presented in his 1883 paper suggest 2020 (Rott 1990), but in his later paper (Reynolds 1895) he quotes the range of 19002000. Over the years, the uncertainty and variability in this number have grown larger. For instance, Prandtl & Tietjens (1931) wrote that no turbulence can be expected to occur below 1000, and many textbooks quote values of approximately 2000. Very revealing are the entries to the Wikipedia online encyclopaedia in its different languages. As of 28 February 2008, the quote for the critical Reynolds number is 2300 in the English, French and Swedish versions, and 2320 in the German version. In other languages, intervals for the transition are given in the form of lower values below which the ow is laminar and upper values above which it is turbulent. For instance, the Spanish version gives the range of 20004000, the Polish one gives 230010 000, the Dutch version has 23003500, and the Portuguese one 20003000. Of course, the quoted values depend on the criteria used for their denition, and Rotta (1956) or Wygnanski & Champagne (1973) and Wygnanski et al. (1975) carefully describe their criteria. The 125th anniversary of the publication of Reynolds seminal paper is a welcome opportunity to take stock of where we are in our understanding of these puzzling observations. The contributions to this volume highlight several recent developments in pipe ow and in the closely related duct and channel ow. They are arranged so that we can begin with a discussion of the lowest critical Reynolds number, turn to a discussion of critical perturbations and close with the unexpected phenomenon of transient turbulence. Re Z
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The difculties in dening a critical Reynolds number arises from the absence of a linear instability: an investigation of the NavierStokes equation linearized around the parabolic prole shows that it is linearly stable for all Reynolds numbers (Salwen et al. 1980; Schmid & Henningson 2001; Meseguer & Trefethen 2003). Perturbations that are sufciently small that they can be described by the linearized equations of motion will therefore decay, and the nonlinear terms are essential for maintaining the turbulent dynamics (Gebhardt & Grossmann 1994). But with the nonlinear terms included, other persistent ow structures around which the turbulent ow organizes itself can exist, very much as in other systems where periodic orbits carry chaotic dynamics (Cvitanovic & Eckhardt 1991). Such structures will have to be three dimensional, and have been found by Faisst & Eckhardt (2003), Wedin & Kerswell (2004), Pringle & Kerswell (2007) and Eckhardt et al. (2008). A family of highly symmetric states is discussed by Pringle et al. (2009). Since turbulence can arise only once such structures exist, the current lowest value of ReTWZ773 for the existence of travelling waves denes a minimal requirement for turbulence. It turns out that all these coherent states are unstable and can appear transiently in the dynamics only. Nevertheless, they have been identied in experimental and numerical simulations (Hof et al. 2004; Kerswell & Tutty 2007; Schneider et al. 2007a). Proper orthogonal decomposition is another means of extracting large-scale coherent structures, and is used by Duggleby et al. (2009) to identify these structures. They have related these structures to turbulent drag and drag reduction by wall manipulations (Duggleby et al. 2007). Some of these structures might be related to the coherent travelling waves. For instance, proper orthogonal decomposition gave rst evidence for helical travelling waves, which also exist as exact coherent states (Duguet et al. 2008). The linear stability of the laminar prole implies that the exact coherent structures have to arise in nite-amplitude saddle-node bifurcations at some nite distance from the laminar prole. A sufciently large perturbation will hence be able to trigger turbulence, but not all perturbations are equally effective. The studies of Boberg & Brosa (1988) and Trefethen et al. (1993) have highlighted the fact that, even when all eigenvalues of the linearized problem indicate decay, there can be transient amplication and growth in energy owing to the non-normality of the linearized operator. A link between these structures, their amplication and nonlinear instabilities as seen in experiments on turbulent puffs is discussed by van Doorne & Westerweel (2009). Theoretical approaches to extract perturbations that are efcient in triggering turbulence are presented by Biau & Bottaro (2009) and Cohen et al. (2009), respectively. The observation that the upper critical Reynolds number can be increased by carefully controlling perturbations in the system shows that the amplitude of tolerable perturbations decreases as the Reynolds number increases. Determining just how this amplitude scales with Reynolds number is not easy. Scaling arguments based on the nonlinear interactions suggest a 1/Re behaviour, as was also seen in some experiments (Hof et al. 2003). Rened experiments (Peixinho & Mullin 2007) and also the numerical simulations by Mellibovsky & Meseguer (2009) and Viswanath (2009), respectively, show a dependence on the type of perturbation, suggesting that at least for some perturbations the critical amplitude falls off as ReKa with a close to 1.5.
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Guided by the observation that between an initial condition that decays and one that becomes turbulent there should be one that does neither one nor the other, a numerical algorithm was developed which allows a trajectory intermediate between laminar and turbulent ow to be tracked (Skufca et al. 2006). When applied to pipe ow, this algorithm converges to a coherent structure consisting of a pair of vortices in the downstream direction (Schneider & Eckhardt 2006, 2009; Schneider et al. 2007b; Mellibovsky & Meseguer 2009). The high Reynolds number behaviour discussed by Viswanath (2009) suggests that these structures maintain their nite distance from the laminar prole: this implies that the scaling in critical Reynolds number then has to come from their stable and unstable manifolds. The most unexpected observation of recent years in pipe ow is that of the transient nature of the turbulence (Brosa 1989; Hof et al. 2006). This transience does not arise from the advection of the turbulence by the mean ow, but is observed in a frame of reference co-moving with the turbulent puff: following the perturbation downstream, one notes a sudden relaminarization without any indication of the imminent decay (Peixinho & Mullin 2007). For these transitional Reynolds numbers, the distribution of lifetimes is exponential (Faisst & Eckhardt 2004; Peixinho & Mullin 2006, 2007; Willis & Kerswell 2007), and can be described by a characteristic time scale. Turbulence is persistent only if this time diverges at some critical Reynolds number. The current empirical evidence is discussed by deLozar & Hof (2009). It seems that 125 years after Reynolds paper, we still do not have a full understanding of the nature of the turbulence transition in pipe ow. But the recent advances in numerical and experimental studies combined with the input from dynamical systems theory have helped to sharpen the questions that we would like to answer (Eckhardt et al. 2007; Eckhardt 2008). As regards the upper critical Reynolds numbers we now know that the ow remains stable for all Reynolds numbers and that natural transition at large Reynolds numbers comes about from the interplay between background uctuations and increased sensitivity of the ow. Thus, the upper critical Reynolds number depends on the kind and amplitude of residual perturbations in the systems, and increases when the perturbations are reduced. The exact nature of the relationship between critical Reynolds number and perturbation remains unknown. As regards the lower critical Reynolds we know that there are coherent structures that exist for Reynolds numbers as low as 773, but do not know whether this is the lowest Re possible. Since there are no experimental observations of any motion resembling turbulence at these low Reynolds numbers, these structures do not affect an appreciable part of the state space of the system. Increasing the Reynolds number above approximately 1650, turbulent puffs are seen experimentally. There are various possibilities for what could happen in the state space of pipe ow between 773 and 1650, but they remain to be investigated. The turbulent dynamics that can be observed at approximately 1650 is transient, i.e. when followed for a sufciently long time, the ow spontaneously relaminarizes. The observations are consistent with an exponential distribution of lifetimes. The characteristic times in the exponential increase rapidly with Reynolds number, and become larger than approximately 2000 time units near approximately ReZ1950. Owing to the rapid increase with Re, this number varies little even when the lifetimes are doubled, and hence may serve as a
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practical Reynolds number for pipe ow in a probabilistic sense. It remains an important theoretical question whether the turbulence remains transient for higher Reynolds numbers or whether there is a transition to a turbulent attractor. Reynolds studies were motivated by their practical and philosophical aspects. For the practical aspect, the law of turbulent friction, some consensus was achieved long ago. The philosophical aspects, about the nature of the transition to turbulence in shear ows, remain attractive to this date. The progress of late builds on our progress in dynamical systems theory as well as the availability of large-scale numerical computations without which the detailed investigations reported here would not have been possible. As a consequence, we now have a theoretical setting in which to approach the problem with very focused questions. While it has taken 125 years to extract from Reynolds observations the questions paraphrased above, it will hopefully not take another century to solve them.
This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

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