Self-preservation of turbulence statistics in the wall-wake flow of a bed-mounted horizontal pipe

Abstract

This research article analyzed the self-preserving behaviour of wall-wake region of a circular pipe mounted horizontally over a flat rigid sand bed in a shallow flow in terms of mean velocity, RSS, and turbulence intensities. The study aims to investigate self-preservation using appropriate length and velocity scales.in addition to that wall-normal distributions of the third-order correlations along the streamwise direction in the wake region are analyzed. An ADV probe was used to record the three-dimensional instantaneous velocities for four different hydraulic and physical conditions corresponding to four cylinder Reynolds numbers. The results revealed that the streamwise velocity deficits, RSS deficits, and turbulence intensities deficits distributions displayed good collapse on a narrow band when they were non-dimensionalized by their respective maximum deficits. The wall-normal distance was non-dimensionalized by the half velocity profile width for velocity distributions, while the half RSS profile width was used in the case of the RSS deficits and turbulence intensities deficits distributions. The results indicate the self-preserving nature of streamwise velocity, RSS, and turbulence intensities in the wall-wake region of the pipe. The third-order correlations distributions indicate that sweep is the dominant bursting event in the near-bed zone. At the same time, ejection is the dominant bursting event in the region above the cylinder height.