A one year post-doctoral position is available at Nordita to work on a project "Turbulence in polymer solutions". The position is supported by the Swedish Research Council. The successful candidate shall work under the supervision of Dhrubaditya Mitra.

The project is a collaboration between Dhrubaditya Mitra at Nordita and Luca Brandt at the Linné Flow Center at Stockholm and the experimental group of Victor Steinberg. Victor Steinberg at the Weizmann Institute. We also have close connections with the group of Axel Brandenburg at Nordita.

PhD degree in fluid mechanics or related fields. The candidate must have received the degree by the time of joining. Precedence will be given to applicants who have less than five years of post-doctoral experience at the time of application.

One year. It may be possible to have an extension for a second year. The position will start in the Summer of 2012.

The applications should include a curriculum vitae together including a list of publications, 2 letters of recommendation, and a short research plan along the scientific topic of the project. The application deadline is 31 March 2012. Applications should be filed though our web interface http://apps.nordita.org/. In exceptional cases, you may also send your application via e-mail to dhruba.mitra@gmail.com.

We study two related turbulent phenomena in flows of dilute polymer solutions. The first is turbulent drag reduction : the drag of a turbulent pipe flow can be reduced by several factors on addition of few parts-per-million polymers. The second, elastic turbulence : dilute polymer solutions at very small Reynolds number can nevertheless become chaotic with a power-law energy spectrum if the polymers have characteristic time scale which is large compared to that of the the fluid (Weisenberg number >> 1).

We shall use direct numerical simulations of the constitutive equations (Navier--Stokes equation with additional equations for polymeric degrees of freedom ), modeling the polymers in both Eulerian or Lagrangian framework. We shall develop and implement new algorithms to model the elastic stresses due to the polymer in the Lagrangian framework. Our model shall be first applied to elastic turbulence and its onset and shall be compared against the recent experimental data. The following are some of the important question we attempt to answer: