Spanwise Spectra Research Articles

The turbulence development of a vertical natural convection boundary layer

Results from direct numerical simulations of a vertical natural convection boundary layer (NCBL) with $Pr=0.71$ reveal that the turbulence development of such a thermally driven convective flow has two distinct stages: at relatively low Grashof number, the bulk flow is turbulent while the near-wall region is laminar-like or weakly turbulent; at sufficiently high Grashof number, the entire flow becomes turbulent in the sense of von Kármán (cf. Grossmann & Lohse, J. Fluid Mech., vol. 407, 2000, pp. 27–56, for the ultimate turbulent regime). Investigations on the turbulence statistics show that the near-wall Reynolds shear stress is negligible in the weakly turbulent regime but will grow in magnitude as the flow transitions to the ultimate regime at higher Grashof number. Similar behaviour is also seen in the streamwise turbulence intensity, where it develops from a mono-peak profile into a dual-peak structure as the Grashof number increases. At higher Grashof number, the near-wall energetic site is shown to have an energy distribution similar to that of a canonical wall-bounded turbulence (e.g. Hutchins & Marusic, Phil. Trans. R. Soc.A, vol. 365, 2007, pp. 647–664), with a peak centred at fixed location and wavelength ( $y^+=18$ and $\lambda ^+_x=1000$ ) in viscous coordinates. Investigation on the spanwise spectra also suggests that the turbulent near-wall streaks emerge only at sufficiently high Grashof number, with constant spacing $\lambda _z^+\approx 130$ . The extent of the weakly turbulent regime is identified using the maximum velocity location $\delta_m$ and a laminar length scale $\delta_u$ . The development of near-wall turbulence is also investigated by examining the turbulence kinetic energy budget. In the weakly turbulent regime, the near-wall turbulence is sustained predominantly by the pressure transport in addition to the shear production. At higher Grashof number, the flow becomes fully turbulent, and both turbulent transport and shear production become stronger, while the pressure transport is decreased. These results also reveal that the production–dissipation ratio $P/\varepsilon$ of the NCBL would follow a fundamentally different trend to the canonical wall-bounded flows, which further supports that the near-wall turbulence generation is affected by the bulk flow.

Post-shock turbulence recovery in oblique-shock/turbulent boundary layer interaction flows

The oblique shock impinging on the supersonic turbulent boundary layer leads to a mixing layer and the emergence of large-scale coherent structures within the interaction zone which leave significant velocity defect and turbulence amplification downstream. In the present study, we investigate the turbulence recovery in the post-shock region by exploiting direct numerical simulation data of the oblique-shock/turbulent boundary layer interaction flow at the incoming Mach number of $2.28$ and the shock angle of $33.2^\circ$ , with special attention paid to the contribution of the mixing layer and large-scale structures to flow dynamics. For that purpose, we propose to split the mean velocity, Reynolds stresses and spanwise spectra into a canonical portion that is constructed according to the statistics of canonical turbulent boundary layers, and a mixing-layer-induced portion. We found that the hidden mixing layer grows with the boundary layer thickness and that the induced mean shear and Reynolds stresses decay at different rates. The mean velocity recovers to the canonical profiles at a distance of 13 boundary layer thicknesses downstream where the mixing-layer-induced mean shear ceases to have strong impacts. The recovery of Reynolds stresses requires 10 boundary layer thicknesses in the near-wall region but a much longer streamwise extent in the outer region due to the slow decay of large-scale motions. These large-scale motions superpose on the near-wall turbulence, intensifying the turbulent fluctuations, yet having a trivial impact on the skin friction, for the contribution of the mixing-layer-induced mean shear and Reynolds shear stress are balanced by the advection term. We further establish a simple physical model capable of approximately predicting the streamwise evolution of mixing-layer-induced mean shear and turbulent kinetic energy. This model suggests that the complete recovery of turbulence in the outer region requires a streamwise extent of approximately 50 boundary layer thicknesses.

Non-equilibrium extension of the explicit algebraic subgrid-scale stress model with application to turbulent channel flow at low Reynolds numbers

An extension of the explicit algebraic subgrid-scale (SGS) stress model (EASSM) of Marstorp et al. [J. Fluid Mech. 639, 403–432 (2009)] is proposed to account for the non-local equilibrium between the production, P, and viscous dissipation, ϵ, of the SGS turbulent kinetic energy in its formulation. The original derivation of the EASSM uses the equilibrium assumption P=ϵ, whereas in the current new derivation, a cubic algebraic equation is extracted for P/ϵ from the modeled transport equation for the SGS stress anisotropy, which can be solved to improve the EASSM predictions with less than 4% additional computational costs per time step. The performance of the extended EASSM is assessed in large-eddy simulation of plane turbulent channel flow at Reτ=587 and 179 for a wide range of resolutions, where deviations from the local equilibrium assumption are expected at the vicinity of the walls. The enhanced EASSM formulation lowers resolution dependence of the model predictions and improves its predictions at low resolutions. The improvements affected major one-point turbulence statistics of interest, such as the wall shear stress, mean velocity, Reynolds stresses, and SGS dissipation as well as the two-point velocity correlations and premultiplied spanwise spectra of the streamwise velocity. The predicted mean P/ϵ also reasonably agrees with the filtered direct numerical simulation data.

Spectral Analysis on Transport Budgets of Turbulent Heat Fluxes in Plane Couette Turbulence

In recent years, scale-by-scale energy transport in wall turbulence has been intensively studied, and the complex spatial and interscale transfer of turbulent energy has been investigated. As the enhancement of heat transfer is one of the most important aspects of turbulence from an engineering perspective, it is also important to study how turbulent heat fluxes are transported in space and in scale by nonlinear multi-scale interactions in wall turbulence as well as turbulent energy. In the present study, the spectral transport budgets of turbulent heat fluxes are investigated based on direct numerical simulation data of a turbulent plane Couette flow with a passive scalar heat transfer. The transport budgets of spanwise spectra of temperature fluctuation and velocity-temperature correlations are investigated in detail in comparison to those of the corresponding Reynolds stress spectra. The similarity and difference between those scale-by-scale transports are discussed, with a particular focus on the roles of interscale transport and spatial turbulent diffusion. As a result, it is found that the spectral transport of the temperature-related statistics is quite similar to those of the Reynolds stresses, and in particular, the inverse interscale transfer is commonly observed throughout the channel in both transport of the Reynolds shear stress and wall-normal turbulent heat flux.

Direct numerical simulation of hypersonic turbulent boundary layers: effect of spatial evolution and Reynolds number

Direct numerical simulations (DNS) are performed to investigate the spatial evolution of flat-plate zero-pressure-gradient turbulent boundary layers over long streamwise domains ( ${>}300\delta _i$ , with $\delta _i$ the inflow boundary-layer thickness) at three different Mach numbers, $2.5$ , $4.9$ and $10.9$ , with the surface temperatures ranging from quasiadiabatic to highly cooled conditions. The settlement of turbulence statistics into a fully developed equilibrium state of the turbulent boundary layer has been carefully monitored, either based on the satisfaction of the von Kármán integral equation or by comparing runs with different inflow turbulence generation techniques. The generated DNS database is used to characterize the streamwise evolution of multiple important variables in the high-Mach-number, cold-wall regime, including the skin friction, the Reynolds analogy factor, the shape factor, the Reynolds stresses, and the fluctuating wall quantities. The data confirm the validity of many classic and newer compressibility transformations at moderately high Reynolds numbers (up to friction Reynolds number $Re_\tau \approx 1200$ ) and show that, with proper scaling, the sizes of the near-wall streaks and superstructures are insensitive to the Mach number and wall cooling conditions. The strong wall cooling in the hypersonic cold-wall case is found to cause a significant increase in the size of the near-wall turbulence eddies (relative to the boundary-layer thickness), which leads to a reduced-scale separation between the large and small turbulence scales, and in turn to a lack of an outer peak in the spanwise spectra of the streamwise velocity in the logarithmic region.

Direct numerical simulation of a turbulent plane Couette-Poiseuille flow with zero-mean shear

Direct numerical simulations of a turbulent Couette-Poiseuille flow with zero-mean-shear at the moving wall (SL-flow) is performed to examine flow features compared to those for a turbulent pure Poiseuille flow (P-flow). Profiles of the streamwise mean velocity, indicator function and ratio of production to dissipation show that the logarithmic region is significantly elongated for the SL-flow compared to that for the P-flow at a similar Reynolds number. In addition, the magnitudes of the Reynolds stresses are found to be larger in both inner and outer layers for the SL-flow than those for the P-flow. The spanwise spectra of the production term in the turbulent kinetic energy equation are examined to provide a structural basis for explaining the statistical behaviors. In addition, because the growth of the energy-containing motions extends to the outer layer further for the SL-flow due to the presence of a positive mean shear throughout the entire wall layer, the self-similar behavior of the energy balance between the production and transport terms with respect to the self-similar wavenumber is found far from the wall. We also find the increase in the number of uniform momentum zones in the SL-flow, revealing the hierarchical distribution of the energy-containing eddies which are composed of multiple uniform momentum zones. These coherent motions lead to the elongation of the logarithmic region for the SL-flow. Finally, investigation of the turbulent energy transfer process in a spectral domain for the SL-flow demonstrates importance of outer layer very-long structures, and these structures attribute to the energy transport process in an entire flow field.

Wall-Normal Variation of Spanwise Streak Spacing in Turbulent Boundary Layer With Low-to-Moderate Reynolds Number.

Low-speed streaks in wall-bounded turbulence are the dominant structures in the near-wall turbulent self-sustaining cycle. Existing studies have well characterized their spanwise spacing in the buffer layer and below. Recent studies suggested the existence of these small-scale structures in the higher layer where large-scale structures usually receive more attention. The present study is thus devoted to extending the understanding of the streak spacing to the log layer. An analysis is taken on two-dimensional (2D) wall-parallel velocity fields in a smooth-wall turbulent boundary layer with = 440∼2400, obtained via either 2D Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) measurement taken here or public Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS). Morphological-based streak identification analysis yields a -independent log-normal distribution of the streak spacing till the upper bound of the log layer, based on which an empirical model is proposed to account for its wall-normal growth. The small-scale part of the spanwise spectra of the streamwise fluctuating velocity below = 100 is reasonably restored by a synthetic simulation that distributes elementary streak units based on the proposed empirical streak spacing model, which highlights the physical significance of streaks in shaping the small-scale part of the velocity spectra beyond the buffer layer.

The spanwise spectra in wall-bounded turbulence

The pre-multiplied spanwise energy spectra of streamwise velocity fluctuations are investigated in this paper. Two distinct spectral peaks in the spanwise spectra are observed in low-Reynolds-number wall-bounded turbulence. The spectra are calculated from direct numerical simulation (DNS) of turbulent channel flows and zero-pressure-gradient boundary layer flows. These two peaks locate in the near-wall and outer regions and are referred to as the inner peak and the outer peak, respectively. This result implies that the streamwise velocity fluctuations can be separated into large and small scales in the spanwise direction even though the friction Reynolds number $$Re_\tau $$ can be as low as 1000. The properties of the inner and outer peaks in the spanwise spectra are analyzed. The locations of the inner peak are invariant over a range of Reynolds numbers. However, the locations of the outer peak are associated with the Reynolds number, which are much higher than those of the outer peak of the pre-multiplied streamwise energy spectra of the streamwise velocity.

Influence of the transition of a laminar separation bubble on the downstream evolution of strong adverse pressure gradient turbulent boundary layers

The evolution of boundary layers subject to adverse pressure gradient (APG) is strongly influenced by the upstream history. Hence, the detailed understanding of APG flows in general or downstream of reattachment of a separation bubble requires a clear acquaintance of the relation between the upstream flow structures and the downstream ones. In this work the results for three different direct numerical simulations (DNS) of APG flows are analyzed to scrutinize the relaxation of these flows having distinct development histories. The three cases have the same overall characteristics – laminar separation, transition, and turbulent reattachment – with respect to the imposed APG and the Reynolds number Reδ990 at the inlet. However, in the first case no additional perturbations are imposed to trigger transition, in the second case the flow is tripped by a trip wire and in the third case a periodic wake is superimposed on the flow. The detailed information provided by DNS is critical to evaluate the current turbulence models and develop new ones. Hence, main points that are discussed are the Reynolds stress budgets, two-point spatial correlations, and spanwise spectra. Attention is in particular directed to a comparison between the three different cases. The most important conclusion is that the flow downstream of the reattachment decorrelates faster with the flow at the transition position if transition to turbulence completes within the separation bubble than in the case the transition completes after reattachment.

Development of instability and turbulence in overturning lee waves: the map of different scenarios in Re–Pr space

Scenarios of the transition to turbulence in overturning lee waves generated by the two-dimensional obstacle in a stably stratified flow have been explored by visualization of velocity and scalar (density) fields, with analysis of spanwise spectra. The results are obtained by numerical solution of the continuity, Navier–Stokes and scalar equations for stratified fluid with the Boussinesq approximation, for varied Reynolds and Prandtl numbers relating to tank experiments, situations in atmosphere and oceans. Based on the computed data, the dependence of the most unstable perturbation wavelength on Reynolds and Prandtl numbers is derived.

Heat release effects on mixing scales of non-premixed turbulent wall-jets: A direct numerical simulation study

The present study concerns the role of heat release effects on characteristics mixing scales of turbulence in reacting wall-jet flows. Direct numerical simulations of exothermic reacting turbulent wall-jets are performed and compared to the isothermal reacting case. An evaluation of the heat-release effects on the structure of turbulence is given by examining the mixture fraction surface characteristics, diagnosing vortices and exploring the dissipation rate of the fuel and passive scalar concentrations, and moreover by illustration of probability density functions of reacting species and scatter plots of the local temperature against the mixture fraction. Primarily, heat release effects delay the transition, enlarge the fluctuation intensities of density and pressure and also enhance the fluctuation level of the species concentrations. However, it has a damping effect on all velocity fluctuation intensities and the Reynolds shear stress. A key result is that the fine-scale structures of turbulence are damped, the surface wrinkling is diminished and the vortices become larger due to heat-release effects. Taking into account the varying density by using semi-local scaling improves the collapse of the turbulence statistics in the inner region, but does not eliminate heat release induced differences in the outer region. Examining the two-dimensional premultiplied spanwise spectra of the streamwise velocity fluctuations indicates a shifting in the positions of the outer peaks, associated with large energetic structures, toward the inner region.

Direct numerical simulations of stratified open channel flows

We carry out numerical simulations of wall-bounded stably stratified flows. We mainly focus on how stratification affects the near-wall turbulence at moderate Reynolds numbers, i.e. Reτ = 360. A set of fully-resolved open channel flow simulations is performed, where a stable stratification has been introduced through a negative heat flux at the lower wall. In agreement with previous studies, it is found that turbulence cannot be sustained for h/L values higher than 1.2, where L is the so-called Monin-Obukhov length and h is the height of the open channel. For smaller values, buoyancy does not re-laminarize the flow, but nevertheless affects the wall turbulence. Near-wall streaks are weakly affected by stratification, whereas the outer modes are increasingly damped as we move away from the wall. A decomposition of the wall-normal velocity is proposed in order to separate the gravity wave and turbulent flow fields. This method has been tested both for open channel and full channel flows. Gravity waves are likely to develop and to dominate close to the upper boundary (centerline for full channel). However, their intensity is weaker in the open channel, possibly due to the upper boundary condition. Moreover, the presence of internal gravity waves can also be deduced from a correlation analysis, which reveals (together with spanwise spectra) a narrowing of the outer structures as the stratification is increased.

Simulations of spatially evolving turbulent boundary layers up to [formula omitted

A well-resolved large-eddy simulation (LES) of a spatially developing turbulent boundary layer under zero-pressure-gradient up to comparably high Reynolds numbers ( Re θ = 4300 ) is performed. The laminar inflow is located at Re δ ∗ = 450 ( Re θ ≈ 180 ) , a position where natural transition to turbulence can be expected. The simulation is validated and compared extensively to both numerical data sets, i.e. a recent spatial direct numerical simulation (DNS) up to Re θ = 2500 ( Schlatter et al., 2009) and available experimental measurements, e.g. the ones obtained by Österlund (1999). The goal is to provide the research community with reliable numerical data for high Reynolds-number wall-bounded turbulence, which can in turn be employed for further model development and validation, but also to contribute to the characterisation and understanding of various aspects of wall turbulence. The results obtained via LES show that good agreement with DNS data at lower Reynolds numbers and experimental data can be obtained for both mean and fluctuating quantities. In addition, turbulence spectra characterising large-scale organisation in the flow have been computed and compared to literature results with good agreement. In particular, the near-wall streaks scaling in inner units and the outer layer large-scale structures can clearly be identified in both spanwise and temporal spectra.