Near Wall Turbulent Flows

This book allows readers to tackle the challenges of turbulent flow problems with confidence. It covers the fundamentals of turbulence, various modeling approaches, and experimental studies. The fundamentals section includes isotropic turbulence and anistropic turbulence, turbulent flow dynamics, free shear layers, turbulent boundary layers and plumes. The modeling section focuses on topics such as eddy viscosity models, standard K-E Models, Direct Numerical Stimulation, Large Eddy Simulation, and their applications. The measurement of turbulent fluctuations experiments in isothermal and stratified turbulent flows are explored in the experimental methods section. Special topics include modeling of near wall turbulent flows, compressible turbulent flows, and more.

Knowledge of near-wall turbulence from experimental, theoretical and numerical sources is accumulating at an ever increasing rate. An overview of the latest important developments is reported and discussed in depth in this volume with the goal of stimulating closer dialogue between researchers in all areas of near-wall turbulence. The full text of 95 contributed papers cover a broad range of topics in near-wall turbulent flows that includes boundary layers, coherent structures, drag reduction, experimental methods, high speed flows, numerical simulations, transition and turbulent modeling. The innovativeness of the contributions demonstrates that near-wall turbulence remains a vital and dynamically evolving field with important technological consequences for the future.

The Origin of Species Charles Darwin The origin of turbulence in fluids is a long-standing problem and has been the focus of research for decades due to its great importance in a variety of engineering applications. Furthermore, the study of the origin of turbulence is part of the fundamental physical problem of turbulence description and the philosophical problem of determinism and chaos. At the end of the nineteenth century, Reynolds and Rayleigh conjectured that the reason of the transition of laminar flow to the 'sinuous' state is in stability which results in amplification of wavy disturbances and breakdown of the laminar regime. Heisenberg (1924) was the founder of linear hydrody namic stability theory. The first calculations of boundary layer stability were fulfilled in pioneer works of Tollmien (1929) and Schlichting (1932, 1933). Later Taylor (1936) hypothesized that the transition to turbulence is initi ated by free-stream oscillations inducing local separations near wall. Up to the 1940s, skepticism of the stability theory predominated, in particular due to the experimental results of Dryden (1934, 1936). Only the experiments of Schubauer and Skramstad (1948) revealed the determining role of insta bility waves in the transition. Now it is well established that the transition to turbulence in shear flows at small and moderate levels of environmental disturbances occurs through development of instability waves in the initial laminar flow. In Chapter 1 we start with the fundamentals of stability theory, employing results of the early studies and recent advances.

This is a graduate text on turbulent flows, an important topic in fluid dynamics. It is up-to-date, comprehensive, designed for teaching, and is based on a course taught by the author at Cornell University for a number of years. The book consists of two parts followed by a number of appendices. Part I provides a general introduction to turbulent flows, how they behave, how they can be described quantitatively, and the fundamental physical processes involved. Part II is concerned with different approaches for modelling or simulating turbulent flows. The necessary mathematical techniques are presented in the appendices. This book is primarily intended as a graduate level text in turbulent flows for engineering students, but it may also be valuable to students in applied mathematics, physics, oceanography and atmospheric sciences, as well as researchers and practising engineers.

Turbulence modeling both addresses a fundamental problem in physics, 'the last great unsolved problem of classical physics,' and has far-reaching importance in the solution of difficult practical problems from aeronautical engineering to dynamic meteorology. However, the growth of supercom puter facilities has recently caused an apparent shift in the focus of tur bulence research from modeling to direct numerical simulation (DNS) and large eddy simulation (LES). This shift in emphasis comes at a time when claims are being made in the world around us that scientific analysis itself will shortly be transformed or replaced by a more powerful 'paradigm' based on massive computations and sophisticated visualization. Although this viewpoint has not lacked ar ticulate and influential advocates, these claims can at best only be judged premature. After all, as one computational researcher lamented, 'the com puter only does what I tell it to do, and not what I want it to do. ' In turbulence research, the initial speculation that computational meth ods would replace not only model-based computations but even experimen tal measurements, have not come close to fulfillment. It is becoming clear that computational methods and model development are equal partners in turbulence research: DNS and LES remain valuable tools for suggesting and validating models, while turbulence models continue to be the preferred tool for practical computations. We believed that a symposium which would reaffirm the practical and scientific importance of turbulence modeling was both necessary and timely.