ALBERT

Description: Waves of spanwise velocity imposed at the walls of a plane turbulent channel flow are studied by direct numerical simulations. We consider sinusoidal waves of spanwise velocity which vary in time and are modulated in space along the streamwise direction. The phase speed may be null, positive or negative, so that the waves may be either stationary or travelling forward or backward in the direction of the mean flow. Such a forcing includes as particular cases two known techniques for reducing friction drag: the oscillating wall technique (a travelling wave with infinite phase speed) and the recently proposed steady distribution of spanwise velocity (a wave with zero phase speed). The travelling waves alter the friction drag significantly. Waves which slowly travel forward produce a large reduction of drag that can relaminarize the flow at low values of the Reynolds number. Faster waves yield a totally different outcome, i.e. drag increase (DI). Even faster waves produce a drag reduction (DR) effect again. Backward-travelling waves instead lead to DR at any speed. The travelling waves, when they reduce drag, operate in similar fashion to the oscillating wall, with an improved energetic efficiency. DI is observed when the waves travel at a speed comparable with that of the convecting near-wall turbulence structures. A diagram illustrating the different flow behaviours is presented. © 2009 Cambridge University Press.

Description: Large-amplitude internal solitary waves generate shear flows that intensify from the wings of the waves to their maxima. Upstream perturbations of the hydrostatic equilibrium in the form of wave packets along the path of wave propagation are expected to trigger shear instability and ultimately generate Kelvina-Helmholtz roll-ups. In contrast, as shown here with accurate simulations of incompressible stratified Euler equations, large internal waves can act as suppressors of perturbations. The precise understanding of the mechanisms leading to different outcomes, including whether instability is excited, is the focus of this work. Under the action of shear flows, small-amplitude wave packets undergo stretching and filamentation, which lead to significant absorption of perturbation energy into the background shear. It is found that this typical behaviour is present in the self-induced shear by internal waves, regardless of whether the shear is stable or unstable, and can leave a quieter state in the waveâ ™s wake for a wide range of perturbation parameters. In the unstable case, even once perturbations are selected to excite the instability, our results show that this absorption can act to reduce growth in the strong-shear region, effectively making roll-up development observable only downstream of the wave crest. Our approach is both analytical and numerical; a model valid for relatively thin pycnoclines and suitable for local spectral analysis is devised and used. Energy diagnostics on the simulations are implemented to validate the numerics and illustrate the energy exchanges between background wave flow and its shear. A link between the absorption mechanism and the clustering of local eigenvalues along the wave is proposed. This promotes an energetic coupling among neutral modes stronger than what may be expected to occur in slowly varying flows, and gives rise to multi-modal transient dynamics of the kind often referred to as non-normality effects. For those cases in which the wave-induced shear meets the conditions for local instability, it is found that the growth of disturbances is selective with respect to the sign of the mode excited upstream. Elements of this phenomenon are interpreted by asymptotic analysis for spatial growth in time-independent slowly varying media. © 2012 Cambridge University Press.

Description: The runup of long strongly nonlinear waves impinging on a vertical wall can exceed six times the far-field amplitude of the incoming waves. This outcome stems from a precursory evolution process in which the wave height undergoes strong amplification due to the combined action of nonlinear steepening and dispersion, resulting in the formation of nonlinearly dispersive wave trains, i.e. undular bores. This part of the problem is first analysed separately, with emphasis on the wave amplitude growth rate during the development of undular bores within an evolving large-scale background. The growth of the largest wave in the group is seen to reflect the asymptotic time scaling provided by nonlinear modulation theory rather closely, even in the case of fully nonlinear evolution and moderately slow modulations. In order to address the effect of such a dynamics on the subsequent wall runup, numerical simulations of evolving long-wave groups are then carried out in a computational wave tank delimited by vertical walls. Conditions for optimal runup efficiency are sought with respect to the main physical parameters characterizing the incident waves, namely the wavelength, the length of the propagation path and the initial amplitude. Extreme runup is found to be strongly correlated to the ratio between the available propagation time and the shallow-water nonlinear time scale. The problem is studied in the twofold mathematical framework of the fully nonlinear free-surface Euler equations and the strongly nonlinear Serre-Green-Naghdi model. The performance of the reduced model in providing accurate long-time predictions can therefore be assessed. © 2014 Cambridge University Press.