Near-wall scaling for turbulent boundary layers with adverse pressure gradient

Abstract

A new extended inner scaling is proposed for the wall layer of wall-bounded flows under the influence of both wall shear stress and streamwise pressure gradient. This scaling avoids problems of the classical wall coordinates close to flow separation and reattachment. Based on the proposed extended velocity and length scales a universal nondimensional family of velocity profiles is derived for the viscous region in the vicinity of a wall that depend on wall distance and a parameter α quantifying the importance of the streamwise pressure gradient with respect to the wall shear stress in the momentum balance. The performance of the proposed extended scaling is investigated in two different flow fields, a separating and reattaching turbulent boundary layer and a turbulent flow over a periodic arrangement of smoothly contoured hills. Both flows are results of highly resolved direct numerical simulation (DNS). The results show that the viscous assumptions are valid up to about two extended wall units. If the profiles are scaled by the extended inner coordinates, they seem to behave in a universal way. This gives rise to the hope that a universal behavior of velocity profiles can be found in the proposed extended inner coordinates even beyond the validity of the extended viscous law of the wall.