Studies In Turbulence

This book contains contributions by former students, colleagues and friends of Professor John L. Lumley, on the occasion of his 60th birthday, in recognition of his enormous impact on the advancement of turbulence research. A variety of experimental, computational and theoretical topics, including turbulence modeling, direct numerical simulations, compressible turbulence, turbulent shear flows, coherent structures and the Proper Orthogonal Decomposition are contained herein. The diversity and scope of these contributions are further acknowledgment of John Lumley's wide ranging influence in the field of turbulence. The large number of contributions by the authors, many of whom were participants in The Lumley Symposium: Recent Developments in Turbulence (held at ICASE, NASA Langley Research Center on November 12 & 13, 1990), has presented us with the unique opportu nity to select a few numerical and theoretical papers for inclusion in the journal Theoretical and Computational Fluid Dynamics for which Professor Lumley serves as Editor. Extended Abstracts of these pa pers are included in this volume and are appropriately marked. The special issue of TCFD will appear this year and will serve as an additional tribute to John Lumley. As is usually the case, the efforts of others have significantly eased our tasks. We would like to express our deep appreciation to Drs. R.

In the last few years the physics of turbulent plasma has undergone rapid development, beginning with the first works, in which the term "turbulence" was used in various ways, and ending with the fundamental studies which provide a thorough examina tion of the turbulent state of plasma. In physics it is usually found that value is not so much contained in specific results for a partic ular field as it is in the more general outlook and overall view of the problem. Occasionally the older results take on new mean ing after the general view of things is perfected. In the case of the physics of turbulent plasma, this general picture is now com plete, for the most part. The first review devoted to the problem of plasma turbulence was written by B. B. Kadomtsev [in "Problems in Plasma Theory," edited by M. A. Leontovich, Volume 4, Moscow, Atomizdat (1964), p. 188; English Translation: "Plasma Turbulence," Academic Press, London (1965)].

Based on his over forty years of research and teaching, John C. Wyngaard's textbook is an excellent up-to-date introduction to turbulence in the atmosphere and in engineering flows for advanced students, and a reference work for researchers in the atmospheric sciences. Part I introduces the concepts and equations of turbulence. It includes a rigorous introduction to the principal types of numerical modeling of turbulent flows. Part II describes turbulence in the atmospheric boundary layer. Part III covers the foundations of the statistical representation of turbulence and includes illustrative examples of stochastic problems that can be solved analytically. The book treats atmospheric and engineering turbulence in a unified way, gives clear explanation of the fundamental concepts of modeling turbulence, and has an up-to-date treatment of turbulence in the atmospheric boundary layer. Student exercises are included at the ends of chapters, and worked solutions are available online for use by course instructors.

Turbulence is a research field where high expectations have met with recurrent frustration. It is a common perception among physicists, mathematicians and engineers that there is a "big mystery" behind the phenomenon of turbulence. Its history has also remained anything but well researched. Unlike topics such as quantum theory, which began to attract physics historians as long as fifty years ago, turbulence has - until now - received only little professional historical investigation. In this book, which complements his earlier SpringerBrief "The Turbulence Problem", the author sketches the history of turbulence from the vantage point of its roots (Part I), the basic concepts (Part II) and the formation of a scientific community that regarded turbulence as a research field in its own right (Part III). From this perspective turbulence research appears to undertake an odyssey through uncharted territories. The book follows this development up until a conference in Marseille in the year 1961, which marked the inauguration of turbulence in the words of its organizer as “a new science”. The epilogue contains some observations about turbulence research since 1961. This book provides a rich source of information for all those interested in the history of this major field of basic and applied science.

This is the first book specifically designed to offer the student a smooth transitionary course between elementary fluid dynamics (which gives only last-minute attention to turbulence) and the professional literature on turbulent flow, where an advanced viewpoint is assumed. The subject of turbulence, the most forbidding in fluid dynamics, has usually proved treacherous to the beginner, caught in the whirls and eddies of its nonlinearities and statistical imponderables. This is the first book specifically designed to offer the student a smooth transitionary course between elementary fluid dynamics (which gives only last-minute attention to turbulence) and the professional literature on turbulent flow, where an advanced viewpoint is assumed. Moreover, the text has been developed for students, engineers, and scientists with different technical backgrounds and interests. Almost all flows, natural and man-made, are turbulent. Thus the subject is the concern of geophysical and environmental scientists (in dealing with atmospheric jet streams, ocean currents, and the flow of rivers, for example), of astrophysicists (in studying the photospheres of the sun and stars or mapping gaseous nebulae), and of engineers (in calculating pipe flows, jets, or wakes). Many such examples are discussed in the book. The approach taken avoids the difficulties of advanced mathematical development on the one side and the morass of experimental detail and empirical data on the other. As a result of following its midstream course, the text gives the student a physical understanding of the subject and deepens his intuitive insight into those problems that cannot now be rigorously solved. In particular, dimensional analysis is used extensively in dealing with those problems whose exact solution is mathematically elusive. Dimensional reasoning, scale arguments, and similarity rules are introduced at the beginning and are applied throughout. A discussion of Reynolds stress and the kinetic theory of gases provides the contrast needed to put mixing-length theory into proper perspective: the authors present a thorough comparison between the mixing-length models and dimensional analysis of shear flows. This is followed by an extensive treatment of vorticity dynamics, including vortex stretching and vorticity budgets. Two chapters are devoted to boundary-free shear flows and well-bounded turbulent shear flows. The examples presented include wakes, jets, shear layers, thermal plumes, atmospheric boundary layers, pipe and channel flow, and boundary layers in pressure gradients. The spatial structure of turbulent flow has been the subject of analysis in the book up to this point, at which a compact but thorough introduction to statistical methods is given. This prepares the reader to understand the stochastic and spectral structure of turbulence. The remainder of the book consists of applications of the statistical approach to the study of turbulent transport (including diffusion and mixing) and turbulent spectra.

This is a reissue of Professor Batchelor's text on the theory of turbulent motion, which was first published by Cambridge Unviersity Press in 1953. It continues to be widely referred to in the professional literature of fluid mechanics, but has not been available for several years. This classic account includes an introduction to the study of homogeneous turbulence, including its mathematic representation and kinematics. Linear problems, such as the randomly-perturbed harmonic oscillator and turbulent flow through a wire gauze, are then treated. The author also presents the general dynamics of decay, universal equilibrium theory, and the decay of energy-containing eddies. There is a renewed interest in turbulent motion, which finds applications in atmospheric physics, fluid mechanics, astrophysics, and planetary science.