Book Description

The Lagrangian perspective, describing a flow from the trajectories of fluid tracers, isa natural framework for studying dispersion phenomena in turbulent flows. In wall-boundedturbulence, the motion of fluid tracers is affected by mean shear and by strong inhomogeneityand anisotropy near walls. We investigate the Lagrangian properties of a turbulent channel flowusing direct numerical simulations at a moderate Reynolds number. Lagrangian accelerationstatistics are compared to particle tracking experiments performed in parallel to this work. Asin homogeneous isotropic turbulence (HIT), the acceleration components along Lagrangianpaths decorrelate over time scales representative of the smallest scales of the flow, while theacceleration norm stays correlated for much longer. The persistence of small-scale anisotropy farfrom the wall is demonstrated in the form of a non-zero cross-correlation between accelerationcomponents. As a result of the average fluxes of kinetic energy in wall turbulence, tracers initiallylocated close to the wall travel and spread over longer distances when tracked backwardsin time than forwards. The relative dispersion of tracer pairs is finally investigated. At shorttimes, pair separation is ballistic for all wall distances. As in HIT, relative dispersion is timeasymmetric, with tracers separating faster when tracked backwards in time. At longer times,mean shear dominates leading to rapid separation in the mean flow direction. A ballisticcascade model previously proposed for HIT is adapted to inhomogeneous flows.