Double scaling and intermittency in shear dominated flows

Abstract

The nature of intermittency in shear dominated flows changes with respect to homogeneous and isotropic conditions since the process of energy transfer is affected by the turbulent kinetic energy production associated with the Reynolds stresses. For these flows, a new form of refined similarity law is able to describe the increased level of intermittency. Ideally a length scale associated with the mean shear separates the two ranges, i.e., the classical Kolmogorov-like inertial range, below, and the shear dominated range, above. In the present paper we give evidence of the coexistence of the two regimes and we support the conjecture that the statistical properties of the dissipation field are practically insensible to the mean shear. This allows for a theoretical prediction of the scaling exponents of structure functions in the shear dominated range based on the known intermittency corrections for isotropic flows. The prediction is found to closely match the available numerical and experimental data. The analysis shows that the larger anisotropic scales of shear turbulence display universality, and determines the modality by which the dissipation field fixes the properties of turbulent fluctuations in the shear dominated range.