Wall effects on pressure fluctuations in turbulent channel flow

TL;DR

This paper investigates how wall-echo influences pressure fluctuations and related correlations in turbulent channel flow, introducing a Green's function-based algorithm to accurately separate pressure components and analyze their effects near walls.

Contribution

It develops an exact Green's function method to decompose pressure fluctuations into volume and wall-echo parts, enhancing understanding of wall effects in turbulence modeling.

Findings

Wall-echo and volume pressure components are of similar magnitude and sign at the wall.

The analysis confirms previous approximations using the method of images.

Results inform improved second-moment-closure turbulence models.

Abstract

The purpose of the present paper is to study the influence of wall-echo on pressure fluctuations $p'$, and on statistical correlations containing $p'$, {\em viz} redistribution $\phi_{ij}$, pressure diffusion $d_{ij}^{(p)}$, and velocity/pressure-gradient $\Pi_{ij}$. We extend the usual analysis of turbulent correlations containing pressure fluctuations in wall-bounded \tsc{dns} computations [Kim J.: {\em J. Fluid Mech.} {\bf 205} (1989) 421--451], separating $p'$ not only into rapid $p_{(\mathrm{r})}'$ and slow $p_{(\mathrm{s})}'$ parts [Chou P.Y.: {\em Quart. Appl. Math.} {\bf 3} (1945) 38--54], but further into volume ($p'_{(\mathrm{r};\mathfrak{V})}$ and $p'_{(\mathrm{s};\mathfrak{V})}$) and surface (wall-echo; $p'_{(\mathrm{r};w)}$ and $p'_{(\mathrm{s};w)}$) terms. An algorithm, based on a Green's function approach, is developed to compute the above splittings for various correlations containing pressure fluctuations (redistribution, pressure diffusion, velocity/pressure-gradient), in fully developed turbulent plane channel flow. This exact analysis confirms previous results based on a method-of-images approximation [Manceau R., Wang M., Laurence D.: {\em J. Fluid Mech.} {\bf 438} (2001) 307--338] showing that, at the wall, $p'_{(\mathfrak{V})}$ and $p'_{(w)}$ are usually of the same sign and approximately equal. The above results are then used to study the contribution of each mechanism on the pressure correlations in low Reynolds-number plane channel flow, and to discuss standard second-moment-closure modelling practices.