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Contributions of different scales of turbulent motions to the mean wall-shear stress in open channel flows at low-to-moderate Reynolds numbers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 May 2021

Yanchong Duan
Affiliation:
State Key Laboratory of Hydroscience and Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, PR China
Qiang Zhong*
Affiliation:
College of Water Resources and Civil Engineering, China Agricultural University, Beijing 100083, PR ChinaBeijing Engineering Research Center of Safety and Energy Saving Technology for Water Supply Network System, China Agricultural University, Beijing 100083, PR China
Guiquan Wang
Affiliation:
Physics of Fluids Group and Twente Max Planck Center, Department of Science and Technology, Mesa+ Institute, and J.M. Burgers Center for Fluid Dynamics, University of Twente, P.O. Box 217, Enschede 7500 AE, The Netherlands
Peng Zhang
Affiliation:
National Engineering Research Center for Inland Waterway Regulation, Chongqing Jiaotong University, Chongqing 400074, PR China
Danxun Li
Affiliation:
State Key Laboratory of Hydroscience and Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, PR China
*
†Email address for correspondence: qzhong@cau.edu.cn

Abstract

Smooth-walled open channel flow datasets, covering both the direct numerical simulation and experimental measurements with a friction Reynolds number ${\textit {Re}}_\tau$ at a low-to-moderate level of $550\sim 2400$, are adopted to investigate the contributions of different scale motions to the mean wall-shear stress in open channel flows (OCFs). The FIK identity decomposition method by Fukagata et al. (Phys. Fluids, vol. 14, 2002, L73) combined with a scale decomposition is chosen for this research. To see whether/how the contributions in OCFs differ with those in closed channel flows (CCFs), comparisons between the two flows are also made. The scale-decomposed ‘turbulent’ contribution results of present OCFs exhibit two dominant contribution modes (i.e. large-scale motions (LSMs) and very-large-scale motions (VLSMs)) at a streamwise wavelength $\lambda _x=1\sim 2h$ and $O(10h)$, where $h$ is the water depth. The large scales with $\lambda _x>3h$ and $\lambda _x>10h$ are demonstrated to contribute to over 40 % and 20 % of the mean wall-shear stress, respectively. Compared with CCFs, slightly higher and lower contributions in the $\lambda _x>O(10h)$ and $\lambda _x < O(10h)$ wavelength ranges are observed in OCFs, revealing the important free-surface effects in OCFs. Possible mechanisms are discussed to lend support for the observed differences between the two flows.

Information

Type
JFM Papers
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press
Figure 0

Table 1.A summary of the open channel flow and closed channel flow datasets. ${\textit {Re}}_\tau =u_{\tau }h/\nu$ and ${\textit {Re}}_{b}=U_bh/\nu$ are the friction and bulk Reynolds numbers, respectively. $L_x$, $L_y$ and $L_z$ are the simulated/measured domain sizes along $x$, $y$ and $z$ directions. $T$ is the simulating (or sampling) duration. ${\rm \Delta} x^{+}$, ${\rm \Delta} y^{+}$, and ${\rm \Delta} z^{+}$ are the inner-scaled velocity vector spacings along $x$, $y$ and $z$ directions. For the numerical case, the two values in ${\rm \Delta} y^{+}$ denote the spacings at the wall and channel centre/surface respectively. The readers are referred to Appendix A for a detailed data accuracy verification for the above datasets.

Figure 1

Table 2.The friction coefficient and its ‘laminar’ and ‘turbulent’ constituents.

Figure 2

Figure 1.Wall-normal distributions of (a) $y/h\ F_R/C_f$ and (b) cumulative turbulent contribution to $\langle \tau _w \rangle$, ${Cum}_{turb}(y)$. Noting that ${Cum}_{turb}$ only takes the turbulent contribution portion into account, thus it will not attain the value 100 % for $y/h=1$.

Figure 3

Figure 2.Local turbulent contribution $k_x(y/h)\ \varPhi _{F_R}/C_f$ to $\langle \tau _w \rangle$. Panels (a–f) are the six open channel flow (OCF) cases studied herein respectively with the flow cases labelled in the lower left corner.

Figure 4

Figure 3.Contribution ${k_x\varPhi _{C_{f2}}}/{C_f}$ of physical length scales to $\langle \tau _w \rangle$, where inner- and outer-scale normalized length scales are used in (a,b), respectively.

Figure 5

Figure 4.Comparison of the contribution ${k_x\varPhi _{C_{f2}}}/{C_f}$ of physical length scales to $\langle \tau _w \rangle$ between OCF and CCF cases at ${\textit {Re}}_\tau =550$ (a) and 1000 (b), where the solid and dashed lines represent OCF and CCF cases, respectively. Red and blue shaded regions indicate the higher and lower value regions in OCF, respectively. Noting that both CCFDNS550 and CCFDNS550VL cases are shown in (a) for demonstrating the potential streamwise domain size effect, and the blue and red shaded regions correspond to the comparison between OCFDNS550 and CCFDNS550VL cases.

Figure 6

Figure 5.Comparison of the statistical quantities and spectra between OCF and CCF at comparable Reynolds numbers, where column (i) presents the profiles of statistical quantities, and columns (ii) to (iv) show the $u$ spectra, $v$ spectra and $uv$ cospectra at typical $y$ positions respectively, with the positions marked by horizontal grey dashed arrows in column (i). Comparisons are made at ${\textit {Re}}_\tau =550$, 1000, and 1500 in (a), (b), and (c) respectively: (a) OCFDNS550 and CCFDNS550VL; (b) OCF1000 and CCF1000; (c) OCF1500 and CCF1600. In (b,c), since the statistical quantities for CCF1000 and CCF1600 cases are only available at discrete positions, the profiles of CCF DNS cases (CCFDNS1000 and CCFDNS2000) are presented additionally for verifying the accuracy of the experimental CCF cases; while in column (ii) to (iv) where the spectra are presented, the CCF spectra indeed refer to the experimental CCF1000 and CCF1600 cases rather than the DNS cases.

Figure 7

Figure 6.Schematic demonstration of the turbulent motions in OCFs to explain the possible mechanisms for the observed differences of scale-dependent turbulent contributions to $\langle \tau _w \rangle$ between OCF and CCF (i.e. higher and lower turbulent contribution in $\lambda _x>O(10h)$ and ${<}O(10h)$ range in OCF shown in figure 4.).

Figure 8

Figure 7.Cumulative turbulent contribution of physical length scales to $\langle \tau _w \rangle$, ${Cum}_{turb} (\lambda _x)$, where inner- and outer-scale normalized wavelengths are used in (a) and (b), respectively.

Figure 9

Figure 8.Contributions of different scale ranges of turbulent motions to $\langle \tau _w \rangle$ by adopting cut-off wavelengths of $\lambda _x=3h$ (a,b) and $10h$ (c,d). (a,c) Results of present OCF cases at different Reynolds numbers. (b,d) Comparisons between OCF and CCF at ${\textit {Re}}_\tau =550$.

Figure 10

Figure 9.Wall-normal profiles of inner-scale normalized statistical quantities: (a) mean streamwise velocity; (b) turbulence intensities and Reynolds shear stress (here negative valued Reynolds shear stress is shown for a better demonstration purpose). The black line and symbols are present open channel flow (OCF) cases, and the remaining lines and symbols in color are these of closed channel flows (CCFs) and empirical functions for comparison. For the log law in (a), von Kármán constant $\kappa =0.412$ and additive constant $A=5.29$ are used (Nezu & Nakagawa 1993). The green lines and expressions in (b) indicate the classical functions for given quantities, among which the functions for the turbulence intensities are from Nezu & Rodi (1986).

Figure 11

Figure 10.The $uv$ cospectra $\varPhi _{uv}$ at $y/h=0.2$. The solid lines are present OCF results, among which the experimental ones are obtained from the Gaussian filtered velocity data followed by 25 % BMF filtering. As references, the raw unfiltered results obtained from the raw velocity data are also presented (as marked by an arrow in the figure). For comparison, the results of CCF cases at identical positions are also included.