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Turbulent penetration of a thermally stratified interfacial layer in a wind tunnel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 April 2006

Jayesh  and
Z. Warhaft
Jayesh
Affiliation:
Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA
Z. Warhaft
Affiliation:
Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA
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Abstract

A stably stratified interface, with strong turbulence below and quiescent air above, is studied in a wind tunnel with the aim of simulating the conditions at the inversion cap at the top of the atmospheric boundary layer. The interfacial layer was generated by means of a composite grid, with small mesh size above and a large one below (Veeravalli & Warhaft 1989). A temperature step generated in the plenum of the wind tunnel, was located at the centre of the layer. There is no shear and thus turbulence interactions, usually masked by turbulent production in traditional mixing layers, are highlighted. Close to the grid where the velocity fluctuations are strong, buoyancy effects are insignificant, but as the turbulence decays they become dominant. The bulk Richardson number, N2B/(〈u2〉2/L2u), where NB is the Brunt—Väisälä frequency across the layer, and 〈u2〉2 and Lu are the velocity variance and integral lengthscale, respectively, of the turbulence on the lower side of the layer, varied from approximately zero close to the grid to 80 far downstream. The stratification inhibited the turbulent penetration into the layer, reducing the high skewness and kurtosis of the velocity field for the neutral case, to Gaussian values. The layer, which initially thickened with downstream distance, thinned when buoyancy became pronounced, owing to the collapse of the heat flux. Significant regions of countergradient heat flux, and reversals in sign of the triple moment transport terms were observed in the upper part of the layer. An analysis of the value of the heat flux conditioned on the temperature fluctuations, showed that the large temperature fluctuations associated with weak turbulence became affected by stratification first. Cospectral analysis shows that these fluctuations are associated with large scales. We also show that although the joint normal approximation between velocity and temperature fluctuations is sound for a passive scalar field, it becomes less good with the onset of stratification, failing completely when the stratification is strong.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Fluid Mechanics , Volume 277 , 25 October 1994 , pp. 23 - 54
Copyright
© 1994 Cambridge University Press

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