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This investigation characterises the time response and the transient turbulence dynamics undergone by rapidly decelerating turbulent pipe flows. A series of direct numerical simulations of decelerating flows between two steady Reynolds numbers were conducted for this purpose. The statistical analyses reveal that rapidly decelerating turbulent flows undergo four coherent, unambiguous transitional stages: inertial (stage I), a dramatic change of sign in the viscous force associated with the decay of the viscous shear stress at the wall together with a mild turbulence decay in the viscous sublayer; friction recovery (stage II), a recovery in viscous force and progressive decay in the turbulent inertia at the near-wall region; turbulence decay (stage III), a balanced decay in both turbulent inertia and viscous force at the near-wall and overlap regions; core relaxation (stage IV), slow turbulence decay at the core region. The FIK identity derived by Fukagata, Iwamoto and Kasagi (Phys. Fluids, vol. 14, 2002, L73–L76) was used to understand further how the flow dynamics influence the time response of the skin friction coefficient (
$C_f$). The results show that although 
$C_f$ plateaus during the fourth stage, the turbulent contribution keeps decaying, undershoots and finally recovers to attain its final steady value. The time evolution of the azimuthal vorticity (
$\omega _\theta$) flux reveals that as the flow is decelerated, a layer of negative 
$\omega _\theta$ is produced at the wall during the flow excursion. As time progresses, this negative vorticity propagates in the wall-normal direction, attenuating the pre-existing vorticity and producing a decay in the turbulence levels.
Numerical simulations have been conducted to identify the dominant mechanism responsible for driving secondary flow motions in horizontal particle-laden pipe flows, based on an analysis of the forces acting on each phase. A four-way coupling Euler–Lagrangian approach was employed, using direct numerical simulations for the gas phase and Lagrangian particle tracking to account for the drag, gravitational and lift forces, together with the interactions that occur for both particle–wall and inter-particle collisions. The four different flow regimes, which had been identified previously as depending on various combinations of flow parameters and are characterised by the secondary flow structures of both the fluid and particle phases, were identified via varying the mass loading alone from 
$\varPhi _m=0.4$ to 
$\varPhi _m=1.8$. The distribution of the divergence of Reynolds stresses was used to help characterise the classes of the secondary fluid flow. This shows that secondary fluid flows of both the first and second kinds can either exist separately or co-exist in such flows. The forces exerted on the fluid phase by the pressure gradient and fluid–particle interactions were examined qualitatively and quantitatively to identify their contribution to the secondary fluid flow motions. A similar study was also applied to the drag, lift and gravitational forces exerted on the particle phase for the secondary particle flow motions. These were found to explain the secondary flows of both the fluid and particle phases with regard to both the flow direction and magnitude, together with the interaction between the two phases.
