Coherent Structures In Turbulent Shear Layers And Relation To Mixing Reaction And Combustion

Coherent Structures in Turbulent Shear Layers and Relation to Mixing Reaction and Combustion

A number of numerical analyses served as experiments which led to a broad range of ideas about the dynamics of mixing layer. One theme which emerged early was the adversary role of vorticity and of deformation - two quanities which attempt to subjugate each other and whose competition is the subject matter of the development and growth to the shear flow. Another strand of the work follows a number of instabilities (two and three dimensional) which lead to recognizable non-linear motions. A third focus of the work relates vorticity and the mixing of scalars. The work started out to attempt to explain striking experimental results and ended by making a number of predictions which have not yet been experimentally established. A significant fraction, though not all of the typical motions which are dynamically plausible in a shear layer have been examined and given simple analytic representation. Finally the basis for the effective control of the shear layer has been laid.

Scientific and Technical Aerospace Reports

Eddy Structure Identification in Free Turbulent Shear Flows

The existence and crucial role played by large-scale, organized motions in turbulent flows are now recognized by industrial, applied and fundamental researchers alike. It has become increasingly evident that coherent structures influence mixing, noise, vibration, heat transfer, drag, etc... The accelera tion of the development of both experimental and computational programs devoted to this topic has been evident at several recent international meet ings. One of the first questions which experimentalists or numerical analysts are faced with is: how can these structures be separated from the background turbulence? This is a nontrivial task because the coherent structures are gen erally embedded in a random field and the technique used to determine when and where certain structures are passing, or their averaged characteristics (in the more probable or dominant role sense) is directly related to the definition of the coherent structure. Several methods or approaches are available and the choice of a particular one is generally dependent on the desired informa tion. This choice depends not only on the definition of the structure, but also on the experimental and numerical capabilities available to the researcher.