The instantaneous structure of secondary flows in turbulent boundary layers

Abstract

Secondary flows can develop in turbulent boundary layers that grow over surfaces with spanwise inhomogeneities. In this article, we demonstrate the formation of secondary flows in both experimental and numerical tests and dissect the instantaneous structure and topology of these secondary motions. We show that the formation of secondary flows is not very sensitive to the Reynolds number range investigated, and direct numerical simulations and experiments produce similar results in the mean flow as well as the dispersive and turbulent stress distributions. The numerical methods capture time-resolved features of the instantaneous flow and provide insight into the near-wall flow structures, that were previously obscured in the experimental measurements. Proper orthogonal decomposition was shown to capture the essence of the secondary flows in relatively few modes and to be useful as a filter to analyse the instantaneous flow patterns. The secondary flows are found to create extended regions of high Reynolds stress away from the wall that comprise predominantly sweeps similar to what one would expect to see near the wall and which are comparable in magnitude to the near-wall stress. Analysis of the instantaneous flow patterns reveals that the secondary flows are the result of a non-homogeneous distribution of mid-size vortices.