On the mechanism of wall turbulence

Abstract

In this paper an attempt is made to formulate a model for the mechanism of wall turbulence that links recent flow-visualization observations with the various quantitative measurements and scaling laws established from anemometry studies. Various mechanisms are proposed, all of which use the concept of the horse-shoe, hairpin or ‘A’ vortex. It is shown that these models give a connection between the mean-velocity distribution, the broad-band turbulence-intensity distributions and the turbulence spectra. Temperature distributions above a heated surface are also considered. Although this aspect of the work is not yet complete, the analysis for this shows promise.