Reynolds Number Effects on the Reynolds-Stress Budgets In
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
PHYSICS OF FLUIDS 20, 101511 ͑2008͒ Reynolds number effects on the Reynolds-stress budgets in turbulent channels ͒ ͒ Sergio Hoyasa and Javier Jiménezb School of Aeronautics, Universidad Politécnica, 28040 Madrid, Spain ͑Received 28 December 2007; accepted 10 June 2008; published online 31 October 2008͒ Budgets for the nonzero components of the Reynolds-stress tensor are presented for numerical channels with Reynolds numbers in the range Re =180–2000. The scaling of the different terms is + Ϸ discussed, both above and within the buffer and viscous layers. Above x2 150, most budget 3 4 components scale reasonably well with u /h, but the scaling with u / is generally poor below that level. That is especially true for the dissipations and for the pressure-related terms. The former is traced to the effect of the wall-parallel large-scale motions, and the latter to the scaling of the pressure itself. It is also found that the pressure terms scale better near the wall when they are not separated into their diffusion and deviatoric components, but mostly only because the two terms tend to cancel each other in the viscous sublayer. The budgets, together with their statistical uncertainties, are available electronically from http://torroja.dmt.upm.es/channels. © 2008 American Institute of Physics. ͓DOI: 10.1063/1.3005862͔ I. INTRODUCTION nolds stress is found not to hold. As determinants, it is clear that failures in the scaling of the energy equations, or in the The interest of the budget equations for the normal and budget of the tangential Reynolds stress, bear directly on the tangential Reynolds stresses in turbulent shear flows extends dynamics of the flow. from their application in formulating Reynolds-averaged tur- The organization of this paper is as follows. The numeri- bulence models to the elucidation of the physics of the cas- cal data sets are introduced in Sec. II, followed by the estab- cade. This is especially true in wall-bounded turbulence, lishment of the notation for the budget equations. The scaling where inhomogeneity makes theoretical understanding par- of the budgets in the outer layers is described in Sec. IV, and ticularly challenging. Experimental difficulties prevented for the viscous and buffer layers are discussed in Sec. V. A final a long time the determination of many of the quantities in- section concludes. All the budgets discussed in this paper are volved, and it was not until the first direct numerical simu- available in Ref. 15. lation of a turbulent channel1 that reliable budgets of the Reynolds-stress tensor could be obtained.2 After that pioneer- ing paper, budgets have been published for other numerical flows,3–9 but they have usually been limited to relatively low II. THE NUMERICAL EXPERIMENTS Reynolds numbers by the resolution of the simulations. Most of the data used in this paper are from the turbulent The purpose of this paper is to introduce the Reynolds- channel simulations10–12 summarized in Table I. We use x stress budgets of a recent series of simulations of turbulent j and u , with j=1...3, for the streamwise, wall-normal, and channels covering a moderately wide Reynolds number j spanwise coordinates and velocity components, and the ki- range,10–12 and to discuss how they depend on the Reynolds nematic pressure p incorporates the constant fluid density. number. It was already noted in Ref. 2 that some dependence The density is also left out of the definition of the Reynolds was to be expected. It was not clear at the time in which stresses. The channel half width is h, and the + superindex direction, or for which range, although it soon became ap- denotes wall units, defined in terms of the friction velocity u parent that the original data at Re =180 were not represen- and of the kinematic viscosity . Mean quantities are capi- tative of many of the features of higher Reynolds number talized, and lower-case symbols refer to fluctuations. Primed flows.9 It has been found since then that the classical scaling quantities refer to root-mean-squared ͑rms͒ fluctuation inten- in wall units of several flow properties near the wall holds + sities. The friction Reynolds number is Re =h . only imperfectly, probably up to arbitrarily large Reynolds The numerical codes1 integrate the incompressible numbers,13,14 and it is interesting to examine how such scal- Navier–Stokes equations in the form of evolution problems ing failures influence the budget equations themselves. for the wall-normal vorticity and for the Laplacian of the The budget equations are relevant both as diagnostic and 2 wall-normal velocity, ٌ2u . The spatial discretization uses as dynamical quantities. As diagnostics, they give informa- 2 Fourier expansions in the wall-parallel planes, dealiased by tion on what has failed when the classical scaling of a Rey- the two-thirds rule. The three lowest Reynolds numbers use Chebychev polynomials in x , while the highest one uses a͒ 2 Present address: Univ. Politécnica de Valencia, CMT Motores Térmicos, seven-point compact finite differences. The characteristics of 46022 Valencia, Spain. ͒ b Also at Center for Turbulence Research, Stanford University. Electronic the different simulations with respect to the large scales are mail: [email protected]. documented in the original publications. Their resolution 1070-6631/2008/20͑10͒/101511/8/$23.0020, 101511-1 © 2008 American Institute of Physics Downloaded 31 Oct 2008 to 83.53.251.224. Redistribution subject to AIP license or copyright; see http://pof.aip.org/pof/copyright.jsp 101511-2 S. Hoyas and J. Jiménez Phys. Fluids 20, 101511 ͑2008͒ TABLE I. Parameters of the simulations. L1 and L3 are the periodic streamwise and spanwise dimensions of the ⌬ ⌬ numerical box, and h is the channel half width. 1 and 3 are the resolutions in terms of Fourier modes. N2 is the number of wall-normal collocation points. NF is the number of fields used for the statistics, and T is their time span. / / ⌬+ ⌬+ / Case Line Re L1 hL3 h 1 3 N2 NF uT h L180 ¯¯·· 186 12 4 9 6.7 97 106 63 L550 —·— 547 8 4 13 6.7 257 149 22 L950 ---- 934 8 3 11 5.7 385 74 12 L2000 — 2003 8 3 12 6.1 633 226 11 properties regarding the smallest scales are discussed in Note that homogeneity along the two wall-parallel direc- Ref. 16. tions implies that some terms in Eq. ͑1͒ vanish identically for Because of minor bugs discovered in L550 and L950 equilibrium channels. Note also that the definitions of K and after the original runs, their statistics have been recomputed VK are in part interchangeable, and that the decomposition by rerunning with a clean code each of the several hundred used above is not the “thermodynamically correct” one.18 stored fields, long enough for their statistics near the wall to However, it is known that the difference between the two stabilize. The occasion was used to extend L550, for which definitions is negligible everywhere for low Reynolds num- relatively few fields had been stored, by several extra eddy ber channels,19 and the same is true for the present ones. turnovers, and to compute the budgets presented here. The difference between the new and the older statistics was found IV. THE OUTER LAYERS + Ϸ to be negligible except below x2 1, which was the location of the most important bug. The statistics of L180 and L2000 Away from the buffer layer, the basic scaling of all the ͑ ͒ / 3 / terms in Eq. 1 at a fixed x2 h is u h. In an ideal logarith- were, as far as we know, bug-free. The behaviors of the 2 turbulent intensities and of the spectra in the buffer layer are mic layer, the tangential Reynolds stress would be u, and / discussed in the original publications for the individual simu- U1,2=u x2, where is the Kármán constant so that the 3 / lations, and those in the logarithmic and outer layers are kinetic energy production would be u x2. As a conse- quence, it can be expected that all the terms in Eq. ͑1͒ should further discussed in Ref. 17. −1 decrease away from the wall roughly as x2 , and it is conve- nient to represent them premultiplied by x2, as in Fig. 1. With III. THE BUDGET EQUATIONS the logarithmic abscissa used in that figure, this has the added advantage of making areas proportional to the inte- Following Ref. 2, the budget equation for the component −1 grated energy. Note that the x2 behavior holds reasonably ͗u u ͘ of the Reynolds-stress tensor is written as + Ϸ ͑ / i j well for all the budgets in Fig. 1, from x2 50 x2 h Ϸ ͒ / Ϸ B ϵ D͗u u ͘/Dt = P + + T + ⌸s + ⌸d + V , ͑1͒ 0.025 to x2 h 0.4. ij i j ij ij ij ij ij ij In agreement with previous results,2 all the budgets where ͗͘ stands for averaging over the two homogeneous above the buffer layer are dominated by a few terms. Energy directions and time. The different terms in the right-hand enters the flow through the streamwise velocity fluctuations, side of Eq. ͑1͒ are referred to as production, dissipation, from where it is extracted by the dissipation and by the turbulent diffusion, pressure-strain, pressure diffusion, and pressure-strain term. The pressure redistributes the energy to viscous diffusion, and are defined as u2 and u3, from where it is dissipated. All the other terms are / Ϸ P =−͗u u ͘U − ͗u u ͘U , ͑2͒ small except above x2 h 0.4, where the production de- ij i k j,k j k i,k creases because the mean velocity profile flattens, and the =−2͗u u ͘, ͑3͒ dissipation and redistribution terms are compensated by the ij i,k j,k turbulent and pressure diffusions.