A Josephson-Anderson relation for drag in classical channel flows with streamwise periodicity: Effects of wall roughness

TL;DR

This paper extends the Josephson-Anderson relation to classical turbulent channel flows with streamwise periodicity, linking pressure work to vorticity flux and revealing how wall roughness influences drag and dissipation.

Contribution

It generalizes the Josephson-Anderson relation for periodic channels, incorporating wall roughness effects and providing a new framework for analyzing drag and vorticity in classical turbulence.

Findings

Vortex separation from roughness creates drag at each instant.

The new relation links pressure work to vorticity flux in periodic channels.

Numerical results illustrate the relation's application to roughness-induced drag.

Abstract

The detailed Josephson-Anderson relation equates instantaneous work by pressure drop over any streamwise segment of a general channel and wall-normal flux of spanwise vorticity spatially integrated over that section. This relation was first derived by Huggins for quantum superfluids, but it holds also for internal flows of classical fluids and for external flows around solid bodies, corresponding there to relations of Burgers, Lighthill, Kambe, Howe and others. All of these prior results employ a background potential Euler flow with the same inflow/outflow as the physical flow, just as in Kelvin's minimum energy theorem, so that the reference potential incorporates information about flow geometry. We here generalize the detailed Josephson-Anderson relation to streamwise periodic channels appropriate for numerical simulation of classical fluid turbulence. We show that the original Neumann b.c. used by Huggins for the background potential create an unphysical vortex sheet in a periodic channel, so that we substitute instead Dirichlet b.c. We show that the minimum energy theorem still holds and our new Josephson-Anderson relation again equates work by pressure drop instantaneously to integrated flux of spanwise vorticity. The result holds for both Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluids and for general curvilinear walls. We illustrate our new formula with numerical results in a periodic channel flow with a single smooth bump, which reveals how vortex separation from the roughness element creates drag at each time instant. Drag and dissipation are thus related to vorticity structure and dynamics locally in space and time, with important applications to drag-reduction and to explanation of anomalous dissipation at high Reynolds numbers.