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Wall-attached and wall-detached eddies in wall-bounded turbulent flows

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2019

Ruifeng Hu
Affiliation:
Key Laboratory of Mechanics on Disaster and Environment in Western China, Ministry of Education, and Department of Mechanics and Engineering Sciences, College of Civil Engineering and Mechanics, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou731000, China Department of Mechanical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA Research Center for Applied Mechanics, School of Mechano-Electronic Engineering, Xidian University, Xi’an710071, China
Xiang I. A. Yang*
Affiliation:
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Pennsylvania State University, State College,PA 16802, USA
Xiaojing Zheng*
Affiliation:
Research Center for Applied Mechanics, School of Mechano-Electronic Engineering, Xidian University, Xi’an710071, China
*
Email addresses for correspondence: xiangyang@psu.edu, xjzheng@xidian.edu.cn
Email addresses for correspondence: xiangyang@psu.edu, xjzheng@xidian.edu.cn

Abstract

According to Townsend’s attached eddy hypothesis (AEH), a boundary layer flow is comprised of wall-attached eddies, but to extract the part of the flow whose statistical behaviours are well described by the AEH is not at all straightforward. The objective of this work is to extract the part of the flow that can be described by the AEH, and study the statistical behaviours of the other part, which cannot be described by the AEH. In this process, two types of eddies are identified in addition to the Kolmogorov-scale eddies, i.e. wall-attached eddies and wall-detached eddies. The statistical behaviours of the wall-attached eddies are shown to be very well described by the AEH, i.e. the eddies are wall-attached, self-similar and, importantly, Gaussian, whereas the wall-detached eddies cannot be modelled by the AEH. Specifically, a decomposition scheme is proposed following Townsend (The Structure of Turbulent Shear Flow, Cambridge University Press, 1976). We apply our decomposition scheme to three different flows, i.e. channel, boundary layer and atmospheric surface layer flows. The results are similar with only quantitative differences, suggesting possible universality in both the wall-attached eddies and the wall-detached eddies.

Information

Type
JFM Papers
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2019. Published by Cambridge University Press

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