No Arabic abstract
In line with Pomeaus conjecture about the relevance of directed percolation (DP) to turbulence onset/decay in wall-bounded flows, we propose a minimal stochastic model dedicated to the interpretation of the spatially intermittent regimes observed in channel flow before its return to laminar flow. Numerical simulations show that a regime with bands obliquely drifting in two stream-wise symmetrical directions bifurcates into an asymmetrical regime, before ultimately decaying to laminar flow. The model is expressed in terms of a probabilistic cellular automaton evolving von Neumann neighbourhoods with probabilities educed from a close examination of simulation results. It implements band propagation and the two main local processes: longitudinal splitting involving bands with the same orientation, and transversal splitting giving birth to a daughter band with orientation opposite to that of its mother. The ultimate decay stage observed to display one-dimensional DP properties in a two-dimensional geometry is interpreted as resulting from the irrelevance of lateral spreading in the single-orientation regime. The model also reproduces the bifurcation restoring the symmetry upon variation of the probability attached to transversal splitting, which opens the way to a study of the critical properties of that bifurcation, in analogy with thermodynamic phase transitions.
The transitional regime of plane channel flow is investigated {above} the transitional point below which turbulence is not sustained, using direct numerical simulation in large domains. Statistics of laminar-turbulent spatio-temporal intermittency are reported. The geometry of the pattern is first characterized, including statistics for the angles of the laminar-turbulent stripes observed in this regime, with a comparison to experiments. High-order statistics of the local and instantaneous bulk velocity, wall shear stress and turbulent kinetic energy are then provided. The distributions of the two former quantities have non-trivial shapes, characterized by a large kurtosis and/or skewness. Interestingly, we observe a strong linear correlation between their kurtosis and their skewness squared, which is usually reported at much higher Reynolds number in the fully turbulent regime.
A system of simplified equations is proposed to govern the feedback interactions of large-scale flows present in laminar-turbulent patterns of transitional wall-bounded flows, with small-scale Reynolds stresses generated by the self-sustainment process of turbulence itself modeled using an extension of Waleffes approach (Phys. Fluids 9 (1997) 883-900), the detailed expression of which is displayed as an annex to the main text.
Wall-bounded flows experience a transition to turbulence characterized by the coexistence of laminar and turbulent domains in some range of Reynolds number R, the natural control parameter. This transitional regime takes place between an upper threshold Rt above which turbulence is uniform (featureless) and a lower threshold Rg below which any form of turbulence decays, possibly at the end of overlong chaotic transients. The most emblematic cases of flow along flat plates transiting to/from turbulence according to this scenario are reviewed. The coexistence is generally in the form of bands, alternatively laminar and turbulent, and oriented obliquely with respect to the general flow direction. The final decay of the bands at Rg points to the relevance of directed percolation and criticality in the sense of statistical-physics phase transitions. The nature of the transition at Rt where bands form is still somewhat mysterious and does not easily fit the scheme holding for pattern-forming instabilities at increasing control parameter on a laminar background. In contrast, the bands arise at Rt out of a uniform turbulent background at a decreasing control parameter. Ingredients of a possible theory of laminar-turbulent patterning are discussed.
We report the experimental evidence of the existence of a random attractor in a fully developed turbulent swirling flow. By defining a global observable which tracks the asymmetry in the flux of angular momentum imparted to the flow, we can first reconstruct the associated turbulent attractor and then follow its route towards chaos. We further show that the experimental attractor can be modeled by stochastic Duffing equations, that match the quantitative properties of the experimental flow, namely the number of quasi-stationary states and transition rates among them, the effective dimensions, and the continuity of the first Lyapunov exponents. Such properties can neither be recovered using deterministic models nor using stochastic differential equations based on effective potentials obtained by inverting the probability distributions of the experimental global observables. Our findings open the way to low dimensional modeling of systems featuring a large number of degrees of freedom and multiple quasi-stationary states.
We investigate the applicability of machine learning based reduced order model (ML-ROM) to three-dimensional complex flows. As an example, we consider a turbulent channel flow at the friction Reynolds number of $Re_tau=110$ in a minimum domain which can maintain coherent structures of turbulence. Training data set are prepared by direct numerical simulation (DNS). The present ML-ROM is constructed by combining a three-dimensional convolutional neural network autoencoder (CNN-AE) and a long short-term memory (LSTM). The CNN-AE works to map high-dimensional flow fields into a low-dimensional latent space. The LSTM is then utilized to predict a temporal evolution of the latent vectors obtained by the CNN-AE. The combination of CNN-AE and LSTM can represent the spatio-temporal high-dimensional dynamics of flow fields by only integrating the temporal evolution of the low-dimensional latent dynamics. The turbulent flow fields reproduced by the present ML-ROM show statistical agreement with the reference DNS data in time-ensemble sense, which can also be found through an orbit-based analysis. Influences of the population of vortical structures contained in the domain and the time interval used for temporal prediction on the ML- ROM performance are also investigated. The potential and limitation of the present ML-ROM for turbulence analysis are discussed at the end of our presentation.