The nature of turbulence in compressible homentropic constant shear flows: its vortex and wave contents and self-sustenance.

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Holger Foysi
• Subject Area: Fluid Mechanics
• Term: from 2020 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 438287556

he aim of this project is to investigate the mechanism of sustenance of turbulence in spectrally stable compressible homogeneous shear flow. The motivation of our proposal is the progress achieved recently when studying the dynamics of incompressible and compressible shear flow turbulence (G. Mamatsashvili et al., “Dynamics of homogeneous shear turbulence: A key role of the nonlinear transverse cascade in the bypass concept”, Phys.Rev.E, 94, 2016 and Hau et al., A comparative numerical analysis of linear and nonlinear aerodynamic sound generation by vortex disturbances in homentropic constant shear flows, Physics of Fluids, 27 (2015)). There we examined the interplay of linear transient growth of Fourier harmonics and nonlinear processes. In this spectrally stable flow the linear growth of the harmonics has a transient nature and is strongly anisotropic in spectral space. This, in turn, leads to anisotropy of nonlinear processes in spectral space and, as a result, the main nonlinear process appears to be not a direct/inverse, but rather a transverse/angular redistribution of harmonics in Fourier space referred to as the nonlinear transverse cascade. In our paper, this new nonlinear transverse cascade was studied and analysed in detail for incompressible homogeneous shear flow. We demonstrated, that the turbulence is sustained by the interplay of the linear transient growth and the nonlinear transverse cascade. It was shown additionally, that turbulence in these type of flows be described by compressible vortex modes and acoustic waves. A refined procedure of separation of these modes was developed, which will be one of the basic methodologies used for this project, too. The generated acoustic field is anisotropic in the wavenumber plane, which results in highly directional linear sound radiation, whereas the nonlinearly generated waves are almost omni-directional. Its source is the linear mode-coupling induced by non-normality, which becomes efficient at moderate Mach numbers. In compressible homogeneous shear flows vortex and acoustic wave modes are linearly coupled. This leads to the inevitable generation of acoustic wave modes from the vortex ones and a likely connection to the transverse cascade. Thus, motivated by these novelties, we propose to perform the analysis of the turbulence dynamics in spectral space for compressible homogeneous shear flow to investigate how the nonlinear transverse cascade manifests itself there, as intrinsic compressibility effects could come into play, influencing the dynamics. This will be achieved by simulating homogeneous shear turbulence subject to varying gradient and turbulent Mach numbers.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Georgia
• Cooperation Partner: Professor George Chagelishvili, Ph.D.