1154 papers
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.
Three-dimensional experiments on a school of three pitching hydrofoils reveal that optimal thrust and efficiency gains are achieved through compact formations where followers directly capture vortices from leaders, driven by specific vortex-body and body-to-body interactions rather than traditional wake drafting, though maintaining such high-performance arrangements likely requires active control due to cross-stream instability.
This study reveals that insoluble surfactants modulate coupled Rayleigh-Taylor and Faraday instabilities in vertically oscillated liquid films by inducing frequency-dependent Marangoni transport that selectively suppresses subharmonic modes at high frequencies while merging instability tongues and potentially destabilizing the system at low frequencies.
This paper proposes that classical turbulence obeys an area law by deriving a stochastic Navier-Stokes equation from an open quantum system via the Madelung transform, where viscosity and noise emerge from Lindblad operators and the resulting circulation statistics follow the Migdal area law due to the codimension-2 topology of wavefunction zeros.
This paper presents an experimental demonstration of a model-free single-step deep reinforcement learning (SDRL) controller that successfully suppresses Tollmien-Schlichting (TS) waves in a flat plate boundary layer by adaptively tuning a finite-impulse-response filter to drive a dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) plasma actuator, achieving robust disturbance reduction across various flow conditions and frequency spectra.
This paper theoretically demonstrates that standing bulk acoustic waves can suppress Rayleigh-Taylor instability and significantly reduce fluid mixing in minichannels by satisfying specific conditions of critical acoustic energy density and perpendicular wave orientation relative to the fluid interface.
This paper proposes a first-principles statistical field theory for isotropic turbulence that, through Helmholtz decomposition of the angular momentum field, reveals a topologically quantized equipartition between coherent structures and a thermal bath, leading to a energy hierarchy and a thermodynamic equilibrium sustained by a radial mechanical piston analogous to vortex stretching.
This paper introduces an equation-free, data-driven framework using neural operators and automatic differentiation to automatically identify stability properties and optimal forcing responses in complex physical systems directly from observation data, bypassing the need for known governing equations.
This paper advances Townsend's attached eddy hypothesis by formulating an inverse problem to derive influence kernels from DNS data, which are then used to construct and validate a minimal, Biot-Savart-consistent hairpin eddy model that successfully reproduces mean velocity and Reynolds stress statistics across high Reynolds numbers through a novel scale-by-scale decomposition.
This study utilizes smoke wire visualization to demonstrate that synthetic jet flow control over a NACA 0025 wing effectively reattaches stalled flow at the midspan through spanwise contraction and coherent structures, though its efficacy diminishes away from the centerline and high-frequency actuation generates unique small-scale shear layer features.
This study demonstrates that high-frequency synthetic jet actuation outperforms low-frequency control in stabilizing flow reattachment and enhancing aerodynamic characteristics on a stalled NACA 0025 airfoil, while also revealing significant spanwise variations in control authority and flow structure evolution.