Large-scale streaks in a turbulent bluff body wake

Abstract

A turbulent circular disk wake database (Chongsiripinyo \& Sarkar, \textit{J. Fluid Mech.}, vol. 885, 2020) at Reynolds number $\text{Re}=U_{\infty }D/\nu =5\times 10^4$ is interrogated to identify the presence of large-scale streaks - coherent elongated regions of streamwise velocity. The unprecedented streamwise length - until $x/D\approx 120$ - of the simulation enables investigation of the near and far wake. The near wake is dominated by the vortex shedding (VS) mode residing at azimuthal wavenumber $m=1$ and Strouhal number $\text{St}=0.135$. After filtering out the VS structure, conclusive evidence of large-scale streaks with frequency $\text{St}\to 0$, equivalently streamwise wavenumber $k_x\to 0$ in the wake, becomes apparent in visualizations and spectra. These streaky structures are found throughout the simulation domain beyond $x/D\approx 10$. Conditionally averaged streamwise vorticity fields reveal that the lift-up mechanism is active in the near as well as the far wake, and that ejections contribute more than sweep to events of intense $-u_x^{\prime }{u}_r^{\prime }$. Spectral proper orthogonal decomposition (SPOD) is employed to extract the energy and the spatiotemporal features of the large-scale streaks. The streak energy is concentrated in the $m=2$ azimuthal mode over the entire domain. Finally, bispectral mode decomposition (BMD) is conducted to reveal strong interaction between $m=1$ and $\text{St}=\pm 0.135$ modes to give the $m=2,\text{St}=0$ streak mode. Our results indicate that the self-interaction of the VS mode generates the $m=2,\text{St}=0$ streamwise vortices, which leads to streak formation through the lift-up process. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first study that reports and characterizes large-scale low-frequency streaks and the associated lift-up mechanism in a turbulent wake.

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Cited by in corpus (3)

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