Velocity Transformation for a FENE-P Fluid

Wall-bounded drag-reduced viscoelastic turbulent flows have applications in oil and gas industry, firefighting, chemical processing, and many more. The mean velocity profiles in these flows play a key role in understanding the mechanisms behind polymer drag reduction. Unlike Newtonian channel flows, the velocity profile contains a thickened buffer layer and a delayed log layer transition as drag reduction increases. Dubief et al. (2012) also showed that in the high drag reduction regime, the logarithmic region vanishes. Additionally, direct numerical simulations (DNS) of the FENE-P equations are computationally expensive, creating a need for lower-fidelity alternatives for wall turbulence, such as wall modeled large-eddy simulations (WMLES). While the mean velocity profile has been studied in depth, a transformation from the viscoelastic to the Newtonian profile remains to be explored for the development of WMLES for viscoelastic flows. Using various DNS datasets in channel flow with a frictional Reynolds number ranging from 100-1000 and frictional Weissenberg number from 30-720, we propose a transformation for the mean velocity profile of FENE-P fluids onto the Newtonian incompressible profile. This work will aid in modeling high-Reynolds number drag-reduced wall-bounded flows.