Reynolds number dependence of turbulent structures associated with high-amplitude wall pressure peaks in channel flow

Abstract

We investigate the turbulent structures associated with positive and negative high-amplitude wall pressure peaks in fully developed turbulent channel flows. The analysis is performed by conditional sampling of a channel flow dataset computed in direct numerical simulations. The Reynolds number was varied from 180 to 4000 based on the channel half-depth h and the friction velocity uτ. Positive and negative wall pressure events were associated with small-scale vortex structures identified by Q-criterion. When scaled in wall units, the overall size of the structure was independent of Reynolds number. Positive and negative wall pressure events were also associated with a large-scale sweep motion (of ) from the outer layer, which constitutes a shear layer in the near-wall region. In a statistical analysis of the instantaneous pressure field, a sequence of negative and positive pressure peaks was found to predominate at the wall. The relative contributions from the large- and small-scale structures were qualitatively assessed by investigating the rapid and slow pressure terms from Poisson’s equation. Both terms contributed nearly equally to the positive wall pressure peaks, but the slow term dominated the negative pressure peaks (with a relative contribution of approximately 60%).