Interscale interaction between small-scale structures near the wall and large-scale structures away from the wall plays an increasingly important role with increasing Reynolds number in wall-bounded turbulence. While the top-down influence from the large- to small-scale structures is well known, it has been unclear whether the small scales near the wall also affect the large scales away from the wall. In this Letter we show that the small-scale near-wall structures indeed play a role to maintain the large-scale structures away from the wall, by showing that the Reynolds shear stress is transferred from small to large scales throughout the channel. This is in contrast to the turbulent kinetic energy transport which is from large to small scales. Such an “inverse” interscale transport of the Reynolds shear stress eventually supports the turbulent energy production at large scales.

Interscale energy transfer in wall turbulence has been intensively studied in recent years, and both forward (i.e. from larger to smaller scales) and reversed transfers of turbulent energy have been found, although their corresponding physical phenomena have not been revealed. In the present study, we perform direct numerical simulations of turbulent plane Couette flow with reduced-size computational domains, where either the streamwise or the spanwise domain size is reduced to its minimal length, aiming to elucidate the role of scale interactions in each direction. Our computational results with the streamwise-minimal domain suggest that the interplays between streamwise-elongated streaks and vortices smaller than the streamwise minimal length are the essential scale interactions for both the inner and the outer structures. We further show that these streamwise-independent and smaller-scale structures exchange energy through forward and reversed interscale energy transfers, and the reversed energy transfer maintains the energy production at larger scales. Based on the resemblance between the observed Reynolds-stress transport and the scenario of the self-sustaining cycle, we conjecture that the forward and reversed energy transfers mainly represent the streak instabilities and regeneration of streamwise vortices, respectively. Furthermore, the computation with the spanwise-minimal domain indicates that the interscale energy transfers observed by one-dimensional spanwise spectral analysis are likely related to the individual dynamics of each inner and outer structure, rather than representing their interactions.

In spanwise rotating plane Couette flow (RPCF) a secondary flow dominated by three-dimensional roll-cell structures develops. At high enough rotation rates the flow exhibits a state of zero absolute vorticity at the centre of the channel, as described by Suryadi et al. (Phys. Rev. E, vol. 89, 2014, 033003). They suggested that the zero-absolute-vorticity state is caused by the secondary flow motion of the coherent roll-cell structure induced by the Coriolis force. In the present study we focus on the momentum transport caused by the roll-cell structure of laminar RPCF in order to further understand how the zero-absolute-vorticity state is maintained by the coherent roll cells. The flow is studied through stereoscopic particle image velocimetry measurements, which allow both the Reynolds shear stress and the wall shear stress to be quantified and used as measures of the momentum transport across the channel. Various types of roll-cell structures at different system rotation rates and the momentum transport induced by them are investigated, and the processes in which the momentum is transported in the wall-normal direction are discussed based on a displaced-particle argument as well as the production of the Reynolds stresses. It is shown that the wall-normal fluid motion driven by secondary flow of the roll-cell structure induces two different effects on the mean flow which conflict each other, the momentum transport in the wall-normal direction and the Coriolis acceleration, and the zero-absolute-vorticity state is a stable state where these two effects cancel each other.

In turbulent planar Couette flow under anticyclonic spanwise system rotation, large-scale roll-cell structures arise due to a Coriolis-force-induced instability. The structures are superimposed on smaller-scale turbulence, and with increasing angular velocity ( $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FA}_{z}$ ) such roll cells dominate the flow field and small-scale turbulence is instead suppressed in a certain rotation number range $0<Ro\lesssim 0.1$ ( $Ro=2\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FA}_{z}h/U_{w}$ , where $h$ is the channel half-width, $U_{w}$ the wall velocity). At low rotation numbers around $Ro\approx 0.02$ both large-scale roll cells and smaller-scale turbulence coexist. In the present study, we investigate interaction between these structures through a scale-by-scale analysis of the Reynolds stress transport. We show that at low rotation numbers $Ro\approx 0.01$ the turbulence productions by the mean flow gradient and the Coriolis force occur at different scales and thereby the turbulent energy distribution over a wide range of scales is maintained. On the other hand at higher rotation numbers $Ro\gtrsim 0.05$ , a zero-absolute-vorticity state is established and production of small scales from the mean shear disappears although large-scale turbulence production is maintained through the Coriolis force. At high enough Reynolds numbers, where scale separation between the near-wall structures and the roll cells is relatively distinct, transition between these different $Ro$ regimes is found to occur rather abruptly around $Ro\approx 0.02$ , resulting in a non-monotonic behaviour of the wall shear stress as a function of $Ro$ . It is also shown that at such an intermediate rotation number the roll cells interact with smaller scales by moving near-wall structures towards the core region of the channel, by which the Reynolds stress is transported from relatively small scales near the wall towards larger scales in the channel centre. Such Reynolds stress transport by scale interaction becomes increasingly significant as the Reynolds number increases, and results in a reversed mean velocity gradient at the channel centre at high enough Reynolds numbers.

Plane Couette flow under spanwise, anticyclonic system rotation [rotating plane Couette flow (RPCF)] is studied experimentally using stereoscopic particle image velocimetry for different Reynolds and rotation numbers in the fully turbulent regime. Similar to the laminar regime, the turbulent flow in RPCF is characterized by roll cells, however both instantaneous snapshots of the velocity field and space correlations show that the roll cell structure varies with the rotation number. All three velocity components are measured and both the mean flow and all four nonzero Reynolds stresses are obtained across the central parts of the channel. This also allows us to determine the wall shear stress from the viscous stress and the Reynolds stress in the center of the channel, and for low rotation rates the wall shear stress increases with increasing rotation rate as expected. The results show that zero absolute vorticity is established in the central parts of the channel of turbulent RPCF for high enough rotation rates, but also that the mean velocity profile for certain parameter ranges shows an $\mathsf{S}$ shape giving rise to a negative velocity gradient in the center of the channel. We find that from an analysis of the Reynolds stress transport equation using the present data there is a transport of the Reynolds shear stress towards the center of the channel, which may then result in a negative mean velocity gradient there.

This work reports on the unstable region and the transition process of the boundary-layer flow induced by a rotating cone with a half apex angle of 60 degrees using the probability density function (PDF) contour map of the azimuthal velocity fluctuation, which was first used by Imayama et al. [ Phys. Fluids 24, 031701 (2012)] for the similar boundary-layer flow induced by a rotating disk. The PDF shows that the transition behavior of the rotating-cone flow is similar to that on the rotating disk. The effects of roughness elements on the cone surface have been examined. For the cone with roughnesses, we reconstructed the most probable vortex structure within the boundary layer from the hot-wire anemometry time signals. The results show that the PDF clearly describes the overturning process of the high-momentum upwelling of the spiral vortices, which due to vortex meandering cannot be detected in the phase-averaged velocity field reconstructed from the point measurements. At a late stage of the overturning process, our hot-wire measurements captured high-frequency oscillations, which may be related to secondary instability.