Statistical behaviour of self-similar structures in canonical wall turbulence

TL;DR

This study demonstrates the self-similar behavior of wall-attached turbulent structures across different flows at Re_tau ≈ 1000, revealing geometric self-similarity and specific spectral scaling consistent with Townsend's attached-eddy hypothesis.

Contribution

It provides direct numerical simulation evidence of self-similar turbulence structures and their spectral properties in wall-bounded flows at moderate Reynolds numbers.

Findings

Structures are geometrically self-similar in size.

Turbulence intensity varies logarithmically with wall-normal distance.

Energy spectra exhibit self-similar linear relationships between wavelengths.

Abstract

Townsend's attached-eddy hypothesis (AEH) provides a theoretical description of turbulence statistics in the logarithmic region in terms of coherent motions that are self-similar with the wall-normal distance (y). Here, we show the self-similar behaviour of turbulence motions contained within wall-attached structures of streamwise velocity fluctuations using the direct numerical simulation dataset of turbulent boundary layer, channel, and pipe flows ($Re_\tau \approx 1000$) The physical sizes of the identified structures are geometrically self-similar in terms of height, and the associated turbulence intensity follows the logarithmic variation in all three flows. Moreover, the corresponding two-dimensional energy spectra are aligned along a linear relationship between the streamwise and spanwise wavelengths ($\lambda_x$ and $\lambda_z$, respectively) in the large-scale range ($12y < \lambda_x <$ 3--4$\delta$), which is reminiscent of self-similarity. Consequently, one-dimensional spectra obtained by integrating the two-dimensional spectra over the self-similar range show some evidence for self-similar scaling $\lambda_x \sim \lambda_z$ and the possible existence of $k_x^{-1}$ and $k_z^{-1}$ scaling regions in a similar subrange. The present results reveal that the asymptotic behaviours can be obtained by identifying the self-similar coherent structures in canonical wall turbulence, albeit in low Reynolds number flows.