Thermal behavior of wormlike micelles under turbulent and quiescent regimes

Abstract

Under turbulent flow, wormlike micelles efficiently cause hydrodynamic drag reduction. However, it was demonstrated that beyond specific temperatures, the capacity of the micellar aggregates to produce drag reduction is abruptly lost. This can be associated with the decrease in size of long micellar chains, becoming shorter aggregates, in the sense that small aggregates are not capable to cause hydrodynamic drag reduction anymore. In this paper, we investigate the thermal effect on wormlike micelles under turbulent and quiescent regimes, in order to explore correlations between the size of the wormlike micelles and the hydrodynamic drag reduction phenomenon.