Turbulent windprint on a liquid surface

Abstract

We investigate the effect of a light turbulent wind on a liquid surface, below the onset of wave generation. In that regime, the liquid surface is populated by small disorganised deformations elongated in the streamwise direction. Formally identified recently by Paquier et al. (Phys. Fluids, vol. 27, 2015, art. 122103), the deformations that occur below the wave onset were named wrinkles. We provide here a theoretical framework for this regime, using the viscous response of a free liquid surface submitted to arbitrary normal and tangential interfacial stresses at its upper boundary. We relate the spatio-temporal spectrum of the surface deformations to that of the applied interfacial pressure and shear stress fluctuations. For that, we evaluate the spatio-temporal statistics of the turbulent forcing using direct numerical simulation of a turbulent channel flow, assuming no coupling between the air and the liquid flows. Combining theory and numerical simulation, we obtain synthetic wrinkles fields that reproduce the experimental observations. We show that the wrinkles are a multi-scale superposition of random wakes generated by the turbulent fluctuations. They result mainly from the nearly isotropic pressure fluctuations generated in the boundary layer, rather than from the elongated shear stress fluctuations. The wrinkle regime described in this paper naturally arises as the viscous-saturated asymptotic of the inviscid growth theory of Phillips (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 2 (05), 1957, pp. 417–445). We finally discuss the possible relation between wrinkles and the onset of regular quasi-monochromatic waves at larger wind velocity. Experiments indicate that the onset of regular waves increases with liquid viscosity. Our theory suggests that regular waves are triggered when the wrinkle amplitude reaches a fraction of the viscous sublayer thickness. This implies that the turbulent fluctuations near the onset may play a key role in the triggering of exponential wave growth.