Widest scales in turbulent channels

Abstract

The widest spanwise scales in turbulent channel flows are studied through the use of three periodic channel-flow simulations at friction Reynolds number Reτ=550. The length and height of the channels are the same in all cases (Lx/h=8π and Ly/h=2, respectively), while the width is progressively doubled: Lz/h={4π,8π,16π}. The effects of increasing the domain width cannot be determined with statistical significance in our simulations, since the difference in the statistics between the simulations is of the same order as the errors of convergence. A channel flow similar to the smaller one [Del Álamo et al., “Scaling of the energy spectra of turbulent channels,” J. Fluid Mech. 500, 135–144 (2004)], which was averaged over a very long time, was used as a reference. The one-dimensional spanwise spectrum of the streamwise velocity is computed with the aim of assessing the domain-size effect on the widest scales. Our results indicate that 90% of the total streamwise energetic fluctuations is recovered without a significant influence of the size of the domain. The remaining 10% of the energy reflects that the widest scales in the outer layer are the ones most significantly affected by the spanwise length of the domain. The power-spectral density for kz = 0 remains constant even if the size of the domain in the spanwise direction is increased up to four times the standard spanwise length, indicating that wide, spanwise coherent structures are not an artifact of domain truncation.