Experimental investigation of coherent structures in turbulent boundary layers

The events which are responsible for strong Reynolds-stress production in the near-wall region of a bounded turbulent shear flow have been investigated in a turbulent boundary layer at a Reynolds number based on momentum thickness of Re θ = 4650. The coherent structures associated with the production process have been studied using the quadrant detection technique. All three velocity components were measured in a three-dimensional sampling volume about the point of detection. The conditional ensemble-averaged velocity field associated with the detection of a sweep or an ejection is presented and compared with non-conditioned space–time correlations. Conditional space–time probability density distributions were calculated at all measurement locations based on the occurrence of a Reynolds-stress-producing event at the detection point. The resulting three-dimensional representation of the conditional probability demonstrates that a significant fraction of the events are relatively large in scale, that a hierarchy of sizes exists and that there is a link between the outer flow and the ’bursting’ process. However, many investigators have shown that the ’bursting’ frequency scales with wall variables. Therefore all indications suggest that the scales are generated by a wall-layer mechanism but grow to sizes and convect with velocities scaling with the outer layer.