Timescale and structure of ejections and bursts in turbulent channel flows

Abstract

Burst structures in the near wall region of turbulent flows are associated with a large portion of the turbulent momentum transport from the wall. However, quantitative measures of the timescales associated with the burst event are not well defined, largely due to ambiguities associated with the methods used to detect a burst.In the present study, Eulerian burst-detection schemes were developed through extensions of the uv quadrant 2, VITA, and u-level techniques. Each of the basic techniques detects ejections. One or more ejections are contained in each burst and hence the key idea is to identify and to group those ejections from a single burst into a single-burst detection. When the ejection detections were grouped appropriately into burst detections, all of the extended techniques yielded the same average time between bursts as deduced from flow visualization for fully-developed channel flow in the range 8700 [les ] Reh [les ] 17 800. The present results show that inner variables (wall shear stress and kinematic viscosity) are the best candidates for the proper scaling of the average time between bursts. Conditional velocity sampling during burst and ejection detections shows that these burst events are closely correlated with slower-than-average moving fluid, moving both away from the wall and toward the wall.