Quantifying small-scale anisotropy in turbulent flows

The verification of whether small-scale turbulence is isotropic remains a grand challenge. The difficulty arises because the presence of small-scale anisotropy is tied to the dissipation tensor, whose components require the full three-dimensional information of the flow field in both high spatial and temporal resolution, a condition rarely satisfied in turbulence experiments, especially during field scale measurement of atmospheric turbulence. To circumvent this issue, an intermittency-anisotropy framework is proposed through which we successfully extract the features of small-scale anisotropy from single-point measurements of turbulent time series by exploiting the properties of small-scale intermittency. Specifically, this framework quantifies anisotropy by studying the contrasting effects of burst-like activities on the scale-wise production of turbulence kinetic energy between the horizontal and vertical directions. The veracity of this approach is tested by applying it over a range of datasets covering an unprecedented range in the Reynolds numbers (Re 10^3 to 10^6), sampling frequencies (10 kHz to 10 Hz), surface conditions (aerodynamically smooth surfaces to typical grasslands to forest canopies), and flow types (channel flows, boundary layer flows, atmospheric flows, and flows over forest canopies). For these diverse datasets, the findings indicate that the effects of small-scale anisotropy persists up to the integral scales of the streamwise velocity fluctuations and there exists a universal relationship to predict this anisotropy from the two-component state of the Reynolds stress tensor. This relationship is important towards the development of next-generation closure models of wall-turbulence by incorporating the effects of anisotropy at smaller scales of the flow.