Abstract:Spanwise-rotating turbulent plane Couette flow (RPCF) is one of the fundamental prototypes for wall-bounded turbulent flows in the rotating reference frames. In this turbulent problem, there are large-scale roll cells, which are widely studied. In this paper, a penta-decomposition method is proposed to separate the instantaneous velocity and the total kinetic energy into five parts, including a mean part, a streamwise part and a cross-flow part of the secondary flow, and a streamwise part and a cross-flow part of the residual field, aimed to explore the energy balance and transfer among different shares of the turbulent kinetic energy in RPCF at Reynolds number Rew=Uwh/ν=1300 (here, Uw is the half the wall velocity difference, and h is half channel-height) and rotation number Ro=2Ωzh/Uw (Ωz is the constant angular velocity in the spanwise direction) in the range of 0≤Ro≤0.9.
The results show that the energy is transferred between streamwise part (cross-flow part) of secondary flows and residual field through the correlation between the vorticity of secondary flows and shear stress of residual field. The rotation term acts as a bridge to transfer the energy between streamwise part and cross-flow part of secondary flows (residual field). Moreover, pressure-strain redistribution term also plays an important role in the energy transfer between streamwise part and cross-flow part in residual field. For the streamwise part of residual field, in certain rotate rates, the energy obtained from the streamwise part of secondary flows is larger than that got from mean flow, implying that the streamwise motions of secondary flows have a significant impact on the streamwise motions of residual field.