Scientists have assumed that once a flow of a fluid has become turbulent, turbulence would persist. Researchers at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria), including Professor Björn Hof and co-first authors Jakob Kühnen and Baofang Song, have now shown that this is not the case. In their experiments, which they published in Nature Physics, they destabilized turbulence in a pipe so that the flow turned to a laminar (non-turbulent) state, and they observed that the flow remained laminar thereafter. Eliminating turbulence can save as much as 95 percent of the energy required to pump a fluid through a pipe.