Effects of the roughness height in turbulent boundary layers over rod- and cuboid-roughened walls

Abstract

Direct numerical simulations (DNSs) of spatially developing turbulent boundary layers (TBLs) over two-dimensional (2D) rod-roughened walls and three-dimensional (3D) cuboid-roughened walls are conducted to investigate the effects of the roughness height on the flow characteristics in the outer layer. The rod elements are periodically aligned along the downstream direction with a pitch of px/θin = 12, and the cuboid elements are periodically staggered with a pitch of px/θin = 12 and pz/θin = 3, where px and pz are correspondingly the streamwise and spanwise pitches of the roughness and θin is the momentum thickness at the inlet. The first surface roughness is placed 80θin downstream from the inlet, leading to a step change from a smooth to rough surface. The rod and cuboid roughness height (k) is varied in the range of 0.1 ≤ k/θin ≤ 1.8 (13 ≤ δ/k ≤ 285), respectively (δ is the boundary layer thickness), and the Reynolds number based on the momentum thickness (θ) is varied in the range of Reθ = 300 ~ 1400. For each case, the self-preservation form of the velocity-defect and the turbulent Reynolds stresses is achieved along the downstream direction. As the roughness height increases, the roughness function (ΔU+) extracted from the mean velocity profiles increases, although the velocity-defect profiles for the rough-wall cases show good agreement with the profile from the smooth-wall case. The magnitude of the Reynolds stresses in the outer layer increases with an increase of k/δ. The outer layer similarity between the flows over the rough and smooth-walls is found when δ/k ≥ 250 and 100 for the 2D rod and 3D cuboid, respectively. The continuous increase of the Reynolds stresses in the outer layer with an increase of k/δ is explained by a large population of very long structures over the rough-wall flows. Because the characteristic width of the structures increases continuously with an increase of k/δ for the rod and cuboid roughness, a wide width of the structures leads to frequent spanwise merging between adjacent structures. The active spanwise merging events with an increase of k/δ increase the streamwise coherence of the structures with the appearance of significant meandering.