Wall-bounded turbulent flows at high Reynolds numbers: Recent advances and key issues

Wall-bounded turbulent flows at high Reynolds numbers have become an increasingly active area of research in recent years. Many challenges remain in theory, scaling, physical understanding, experimental techniques, and numerical simulations. In this paper we distill the salient advances of recent origin, particularly those that challenge textbook orthodoxy. Some of the outstanding questions, such as the extent of the logarithmic overlap layer, the universality or otherwise of the principal model parameters such as the von Kármán “constant,” the parametrization of roughness effects, and the scaling of mean flow and Reynolds stresses, are highlighted. Research avenues that may provide answers to these questions, notably the improvement of measuring techniques and the construction of new facilities, are identified. We also highlight aspects where differences of opinion persist, with the expectation that this discussion might mark the beginning of their resolution

Quantitative analysis of the dripping and jetting regimes in co-flowing capillary jets

We study a liquid jet that breaks up into drops in an external co-flowing liquid inside a confining microfluidic geometry. The jet breakup can occur right after the nozzle in a phenomenon named dripping or through the generation of a liquid jet that breaks up a long distance from the nozzle, which is called jetting. Traditionally, these two regimes have been considered to reflect the existence of two kinds of spatiotemporal instabilities of a fluid jet, the dripping regime corresponding to an absolutely unstable jet and the jetting regime to a convectively unstable jet. Here, we present quantitative measurements of the dripping and jetting regimes, both in an unforced and a forced state, and compare these measurements with recent theoretical studies of spatiotemporal instability of a confined liquid jet in a co-flowing liquid. In the unforced state, the frequency of oscillation and breakup of the liquid jet is measured and compared to the theoretical predictions. The dominant frequency of the jet oscillations as a function of the inner flow rate agrees qualitatively with the theoretical predictions in the jetting regime but not in the dripping regime. In the forced state, achieved with periodic laser heating, the dripping regime is found to be insensitive to the perturbation and the frequency of drop formation remains unaltered. The jetting regime, on the contrary, amplifies the externally imposed frequency, which translates in the formation of drops at the frequency imposed by the external forcing. In conclusion, the dripping and jetting regimes are found to exhibit the main features of absolutely and convectively unstable flows respectively, but the frequency selection in the dripping regime is not ruled by the absolute frequency predicted by the stability analysis.Comment: 10 pages, 12 figures, to appear in Physics of Fluid

Delayed Capillary Breakup of Falling Viscous Jets

Thin jets of viscous fluid like honey falling from capillary nozzles can attain lengths exceeding 10 m before breaking up into droplets via the Rayleigh-Plateau (surface tension) instability. Using a combination of laboratory experiments and WKB analysis of the growth of shape perturbations on a jet being stretched by gravity, we determine how the jet's intact length lb depends on the flow rate Q, the viscosity η, and the surface tension coefficient γ. In the asymptotic limit of a high-viscosity jet, lb∼(gQ2η4/γ4)1/3, where g is the gravitational acceleration. The agreement between theory and experiment is good, except for very long jets.</p

The NStED Exoplanet Transit Survey Service

The NASA Star and Exoplanet Database (NStED) is a general purpose stellar archive with the aim of providing support for NASA's planet finding and characterization goals, stellar astrophysics, and the planning of NASA and other space missions. There are two principal components of NStED: a database of (currently) 140,000 nearby stars and exoplanet-hosting stars, and an archive dedicated to high-precision photometric surveys for transiting exoplanets. We present a summary of the latter component: the NStED Exoplanet Transit Survey Service (NStED-ETSS), along with its content, functionality, tools, and user interface. NStED-ETSS currently serves data from the TrES Survey of the Kepler Field as well as dedicated photometric surveys of four stellar clusters. NStED-ETSS aims to serve both the surveys and the broader astronomical community by archiving these data and making them available in a homogeneous format. Examples of usability of ETSS include investigation of any time-variable phenomena in data sets not studied by the original survey team, application of different techniques or algorithms for planet transit detections, combination of data from different surveys for given objects, statistical studies, etc. NStED-ETSS can be accessed at \tt{http://nsted.ipac.caltech.edu}Comment: To appear in the Proceedings of the 253rd IAU Symposium: "Transiting Planets", May 2008, Cambridge, MA. 4 pages, 2 figure

IRSA's New Look: Design Considerations

The NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive (IRSA) undertook a major upgrade to its website and user experience this year. The work was motivated by the need to facilitate access to a growing number of astronomical data sets and exploration tools. The guiding principle of the redesign was to focus on the most important items, while providing easy access to the full set of IRSA's holdings and services. We discuss the redesign process and the key features of the new website

LSST: from Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products

(Abridged) We describe here the most ambitious survey currently planned in the optical, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). A vast array of science will be enabled by a single wide-deep-fast sky survey, and LSST will have unique survey capability in the faint time domain. The LSST design is driven by four main science themes: probing dark energy and dark matter, taking an inventory of the Solar System, exploring the transient optical sky, and mapping the Milky Way. LSST will be a wide-field ground-based system sited at Cerro Pach\'{o}n in northern Chile. The telescope will have an 8.4 m (6.5 m effective) primary mirror, a 9.6 deg$^2$ field of view, and a 3.2 Gigapixel camera. The standard observing sequence will consist of pairs of 15-second exposures in a given field, with two such visits in each pointing in a given night. With these repeats, the LSST system is capable of imaging about 10,000 square degrees of sky in a single filter in three nights. The typical 5$\sigma$ point-source depth in a single visit in $r$ will be $\sim 24.5$ (AB). The project is in the construction phase and will begin regular survey operations by 2022. The survey area will be contained within 30,000 deg$^2$ with $\delta<+34.5^\circ$, and will be imaged multiple times in six bands, $ugrizy$, covering the wavelength range 320--1050 nm. About 90\% of the observing time will be devoted to a deep-wide-fast survey mode which will uniformly observe a 18,000 deg$^2$ region about 800 times (summed over all six bands) during the anticipated 10 years of operations, and yield a coadded map to $r\sim27.5$. The remaining 10\% of the observing time will be allocated to projects such as a Very Deep and Fast time domain survey. The goal is to make LSST data products, including a relational database of about 32 trillion observations of 40 billion objects, available to the public and scientists around the world.Comment: 57 pages, 32 color figures, version with high-resolution figures available from https://www.lsst.org/overvie

The NASA/IPAC/NExScI Star And Exoplanet Database

The NASA/IPAC/NExScI Star and Exoplanet Database (NStED) is a general purpose stellar archive which supports NASA planet-finding and planet-characterization goals, stellar astrophysics, and the planning of NASA and other space missions. There are two principal components of NStED: a database of 140,000 nearby stars and exoplanet-hosting stars, and an archive dedicated to high precision photometric surveys for transiting exoplanets (NStED-ETSS). We present summaries of these components. The NStED stellar database currently serves published parameters for 140,000 stars. These parameters include coordinates, multiplicity, proper motion, parallax, spectral type, multiband photometry, radial velocity, metallicity, chromospheric and coronal activity index, rotation velocity/period, infrared excess. NStED-ETSS currently serves data from the TrES survey of the Kepler field as well as dedicated photometric surveys of four stellar clusters. NStED-ETSS aims to serve both the surveys and the broader astronomical community by archiving these data and making them available in a homogeneous format

The Zwicky Transient Facility: Science Objectives

The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), a public–private enterprise, is a new time-domain survey employing a dedicated camera on the Palomar 48-inch Schmidt telescope with a 47 deg2 field of view and an 8 second readout time. It is well positioned in the development of time-domain astronomy, offering operations at 10% of the scale and style of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) with a single 1-m class survey telescope. The public surveys will cover the observable northern sky every three nights in g and r filters and the visible Galactic plane every night in g and r. Alerts generated by these surveys are sent in real time to brokers. A consortium of universities that provided funding (“partnership”) are undertaking several boutique surveys. The combination of these surveys producing one million alerts per night allows for exploration of transient and variable astrophysical phenomena brighter than r∼20.5 on timescales of minutes to years. We describe the primary science objectives driving ZTF, including the physics of supernovae and relativistic explosions, multi-messenger astrophysics, supernova cosmology, active galactic nuclei, and tidal disruption events, stellar variability, and solar system objects. © 2019. The Astronomical Society of the Pacific