The Effects of Initial Conditions on the 3-D Topology of Temporally Evolving Wakes, (ARI on 3-D Bluff Body Wakes)

Abstract

A three year study of the effect of initial conditions on the topology and fine scale structure of temporally evolving wakes has been completed. Early in the project new topological analysis tools were developed and used to analyze available simulations of the plane mixing layer. During the course of these preliminary studies it was found that certain geometrical features of the fine scale motions in the mixing layer were very similar to those seen in simulations of forced isotropic turbulence. As a consequence, we adopted a two-track approach to the work; one track was to gather together simulation data on as wide a variety of shear flows as possible with the objective of identifying universal feature of the fine scale structure. The second track was to carry out a new direct simulation of the plane wake in which systematic variations of the initial conditions were used to identify structural features of the developed flow which depend on initial conditions. The fundamental questions we tried to address were: What features of the fine scale motions in turbulent flow are universal, what features are not, and, in the case of the plane wake, what information about the near wake survives far downstream?

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Sep 27, 1993
Accession Number
ADA271008

Entities

People

  • Brian J. Cantwell

Organizations

  • Stanford University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Channel Flow
  • Computational Fluid Dynamics
  • Equations
  • Euler Equations
  • Flow
  • Flow Fields
  • Fluid Dynamics
  • Fluid Flow
  • Fluid Mechanics
  • Incompressible Flow
  • Reynolds Number
  • Shear Flow
  • Stratified Fluids
  • Three Dimensional
  • Turbulence
  • Turbulent Flow
  • Turbulent Mixing

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Atmospheric Science / Meteorology, specifically Wind Wave Turbulence.
  • Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)