An investigation of stably stratified turbulent channel flow using large-eddy simulation

Boundary-forced stratified turbulence is studied in the prototypical case of turbulent channel flow subject to stable stratification. The large-eddy simulation approach is used with a mixed subgrid model that involves a dynamic eddy viscosity component and a scale-similarity component. After an initial transient, the flow reaches a new balanced state corresponding to active wall-bounded turbulence with reduced vertical transport which, for the cases in our study with moderate-to-large levels of stratification, coexists with internal wave activity in the core of the channel. A systematic reduction of turbulence levels, density fluctuations and associated vertical transport with increasing stratification is observed. Countergradient buoyancy flux is observed in the outer region for sufficiently high stratification. Mixing of the density field in stratified channel flow results from turbulent events generated near the boundaries that couple with the outer, more stable flow. The vertical density structure is thus of interest for analogous boundary-forced mixing situations in geophysical flows. It is found that, with increasing stratification, the mean density profile becomes sharper in the central region between the two turbulent layers at the upper and lower walls, similar to observations in field measurements as well as laboratory experiments with analogous density-mixing situations. Channel flow is strongly inhomogeneous with alternative choices for the Richardson number. In spite of these complications, the gradient Richardson number, Ri g , appears to be the important local determinant of buoyancy effects. All simulated cases show that correlation coefficients associated with vertical transport collapse from their nominal unstratified values over a narrow range, 0.15 < Ri g < 0.25. The vertical turbulent Froude number, Fr w , has an O (1) value across most of the channel. It is remarkable that stratified channel flow, with such a large variation of overall density difference (factor of 26) between cases, shows a relatively universal behaviour of correlation coefficients and vertical Froude number when plotted as a function of Ri g . The visualizations show wavy motion in the core region where the gradient Richardson number, Ri g , is large and low-speed streaks in the near-wall region, typical of unstratified channel flow, where Ri g is small. It appears from the visualizations that, with increasing stratification, the region with wavy motion progressively encroaches into the zone with active turbulence; the location of Ri g ≃ 0.2 roughly corresponds to the boundary between the two zones.