Numerical investigation of turbulence near a sheared air–water interface. Part 1: Turbulence statistics beneath a flat water surface sheared by wind

Abstract

Direct numerical simulation (DNS) and large eddy simulation (LES) of turbulent shear flow beneath a flat water surface with imposed wind shear stress are presented. The results of DNS indicate that there are clear differences, and also similarities, between wind-driven flow and the flow near a solid wall. The qualitative structures of turbulence are similar in both types of flow. Low-speed streaks are also present in wind-driven flow. On the other hand, profiles of the mean velocity and turbulence intensities in wind-driven flow are significantly different from those in flow near a solid wall. The differences are attributed to the lack of a viscous sublayer, and to the boundary condition which allows fluctuations of the tangential velocity components at the boundary. LES of the same flow was also carried out to evaluate subgrid-scale models. It was shown that the features of the flow observed in DNS are well simulated by all models tested, and that the discrepancies between DNS and LES with the dynamic mixed model are very small.