Study of the vortex structure in compressible wall-bounded turbulence

Abstract

Compressible turbulent channel flows exhibit a multitude of vortex structures dispersed throughout the boundary layer. Although the structural similarity between compressible and incompressible flows has been well established, most of these observations are concluded through merely visualizations of instantaneous fields. We dissect the statistical features of vortices in compressible channel flows comprehensively and show a quantitative consistency with incompressible flows by applying semi-local scaling. This work fills a gap in our knowledge about vortex structures in compressible channel flows and first applies Morkovin's hypothesis to statistics of instantaneous vortex features.