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Abstract

Polymer solutions in the semi-dilute regime are of considerable industrial importance. The complex rheological
properties of such highly viscoelastic fluids and the complexity of their flow characteristics, especially in curved
geometries, necessitate a thorough experimental characterization of the dynamics of such fluid flows. We apply
statistical, spectral, and structural analyses to the experimentally obtained velocity fields of a semi-dilute entangled
polymer solution in a serpentine channel to fully characterize the corresponding flow. Our results show that at high
Weissenberg numbers, yet vanishing Reynolds numbers, the flow resistance is significantly increased, which indicates the
emergence of a purely elastic turbulent flow. Spatial flow observations, and statistical analysis of temporal flow features
show that this purely elastic turbulent flow is non-homogeneous, non-Gaussian, and anisotropic at all scales. Moreover,
spectral analysis indicates that compared to elastic turbulence in the dilute regime, the range of present scales of the
excited fluctuations is narrower. This is partly due to the entanglement of the polymers in this concentration regime,
which restricts their movement, and partly due to the mixed flow type inherent in the serpentine geometry, which can
reduce the extent of polymer stretching and thus reduce the intensity of the fluctuations in the flow. Furthermore, proper
orthogonal decomposition analysis is applied to directly extract the turbulent flow structure and reveals the activity of
the counter-rotating vortices associated with secondary flow, which significantly contribute to the total kinetic energy
of the flow.