Conditional sampling and other measurements in a plane turbulent wake

Abstract

A series of hot-wire measurements has been carried out in a plane wake to investigate the structure of the turbulence boundary and the relation of its instantaneous position to the behaviour in the core of the flow. The principal measured quantities are as follows: mean velocity profile; intermittency factor; burst rate; mean of the longitudinal component of velocity conditioned upon various specified interface positions; autocorrelation of the intermittency signal; probability densities a t the half-intermittency point for the time between bursts and the duration of a burst; probability density for the longitudinal velocity component and its time derivative at various points across the wake; probability density a t the half-intermittency point for the same quantities in the turbulent and irrotational zones separately. In addition, the profile of the second moment of the probability density for the time between bursts has been obtained indirectly and part of the theory of Phillips (1955) has been shown to be applicable in the intermittent region.The present measurements appear to indicate that the turbulence boundary in the wake resembles that in other plane flows more closely than has been supposed hitherto. The theory of normally distributed random noise was found to explain many of the observed statistical properties of the turbulence boundary.