On the role of large-scale structures in wall turbulence

Copyright 2001 American Institute of Physics. Publisher PDF version is restricted access in accordance with the American Institute of Physics policy.Recent experimental and computational studies by Adrian and co-workers, such as Adrian et al. [J. Fluid Mech. 422, 1 (2000)] and Zhou et al. [J. Fluid Mech. 387, 353 (1999)], have proposed that a dominant structure in wall turbulence is the organization of hairpin vortices in spatially correlated packets or trains of vortices. In this study this scenario is investigated using the attached eddy model of Perry and Marusic [J. Fluid Mech. 298, 361 (1995)] by calculating structure angles, two-point velocity correlations and autocorrelations and comparing them to experimental measurements across a zero-pressure-gradient turbulent boundary layer. The results support the conclusion that spatially coherent packets are a statistically significant structure for Reynolds stresses and transport processes in the logarithmic region of the flow