physics.flu-dyn papers | Gist.Science

Fluid dynamics explores how liquids and gases move, shaping everything from weather patterns to the flow of blood through our veins. This field bridges the gap between abstract mathematical equations and the tangible forces that drive our physical world, offering insights into turbulence, aerodynamics, and fluid behavior in complex environments.

On Gist.Science, we process every new preprint in this category directly from arXiv to make cutting-edge research accessible to everyone. Each paper is transformed into a clear, plain-language overview alongside a detailed technical summary, ensuring both students and experts can grasp the latest findings without getting lost in dense jargon.

Below, you will find the most recent studies in fluid dynamics, curated and explained for a broader audience.

Drag penalty during relaminarization and Kelvin-Helmholtz-promoted retransition in an accelerating turbulent boundary layer over initially drag-reducing riblets

This study uses direct numerical simulations to show that in an accelerating turbulent boundary layer, riblets—which typically reduce drag in steady flows—actually increase drag due to concentrated viscous shear near the crests, and they further accelerate the flow's retransition to turbulence through the development of Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities.

Benjamin Savino, Wen Wu2026-04-27🔬 physics

Lagrangian Proper Orthogonal Decomposition

The paper introduces Lagrangian Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (LPOD), a new modal representation method that uses Principal Component Analysis on normalized particle velocity time series to reconstruct turbulent trajectories and potentially enable the data-driven generation of synthetic particle data.

Ron Shnapp, Stefano Brizzolara2026-04-27🔬 physics

Conservative and skew-symmetric forms of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in sigma-coordinates

This paper derives new conservative and skew-symmetric formulations of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in terrain-following sigma-coordinates that preserve the structural and energy-conserving properties typically found in Cartesian systems.

Jaeyoung Jung, Marco Giometto2026-04-27🔬 physics

Waves dictate the yo-yoing decay of a viscoelastic mixing layer

This paper demonstrates that, unlike Newtonian fluids, viscoelastic mixing layers exhibit a "yo-yoing" decay pattern driven by waves that inject energy into the mean flow through the interaction between elastic polymers and large-scale shear.

Giulio Foggi Rota, Piyush Garg, Jason Tang, Marco Edoardo Rosti2026-04-27🔬 physics

Active Jurin's law

This paper extends the classical Jurin's law to active fluids by demonstrating that internal stresses from active nematics can either enhance or suppress capillary rise, leading to a generalized law and potential bistability depending on the activity level and interfacial alignment.

Birendra Mandal, Joydip Chaudhuri2026-04-27🔬 cond-mat

Extending flow birefringence analysis to combined extensional-shear flows via Jeffery-Hamel flow measurements

This study demonstrates that in combined extensional-shear Jeffery-Hamel flows, the flow birefringence of a cellulose nanocrystal suspension follows a root-sum-square relationship of shear and extensional contributions, thereby validating the extension of stress-birefringence analysis to complex, multi-mode deformation fields.

Miu Kobayashi, William Kai Alexander Worby, Misa Kawaguchi, Yuto Yokoyama, Sayaka Ichihara, Yoshiyuki Tagawa2026-04-24🔬 cond-mat.mtrl-sci

Migration and spreading of a droplet driven by a chemical step

Using lubrication theory and Navier slip conditions, this study investigates the migration and asymmetric spreading of 2D and 3D droplets driven by a chemical step, revealing distinct dynamical stages where droplets either move at constant speed or spread with pinned rear contact lines before reaching equilibrium.

Zhuo Long, Peng Gao2026-04-24🔬 physics

Gauss Principle in Incompressible Flow: Unified Variational Perspective on Pressure and Projection

This paper clarifies that the Gauss-Appell principle, when applied at a fixed time to incompressible inviscid flow, yields a variational minimization that uniquely determines the reaction pressure as the Lagrange multiplier enforcing kinematic constraints, thereby recovering the Euler equations and the Leray-Hodge projection without inherently selecting global flow features like circulation.

Karthik Duraisamy2026-04-24🔢 math-ph

Hardware-Accelerated Phase-Averaging for Cavitating Bubbly Flows

This paper presents and validates a robust, accurate, and hardware-accelerated multiscale solver using OpenACC on GPUs to simulate acoustically driven dilute bubbly flows, demonstrating significant performance speedups and flexibility through both volume-averaged and ensemble-averaged subgrid models.

Diego Vaca-Revelo, Benjamin Wilfong, Spencer H. Bryngelson, Aswin Gnanaskandan2026-04-24🔬 physics

Microbubble surface instabilities in a strain stiffening viscoelastic material

This paper presents and experimentally validates a kinematically-consistent theoretical model for the evolution of surface perturbations on microbubbles within strain-stiffening viscoelastic materials, addressing limitations in previous models to improve the efficacy of focused ultrasound therapy and microcavitation rheometry.

Sawyer Remillard, Bachir A. Abeid, Timothy L. Hall, Jonathan R. Sukovich, Jacob Baker, Jin Yang, Jonathan B. Estrada, Mauro Rodriguez2026-04-24🔬 physics