The formulas describe the complex behavior of a liquid when it meets a boundary
Since at least the 1920s, scientists have been puzzled by the turbulence that arises when a liquid hits a wall. For instance, what happens when water violently sloshes against the side of a pool or when crude oil hits the inside of a pipeline? At long last, researchers have discovered equations that describe the intricacies of the behavior seen within the layers of turbulent fluids as they encounter such boundaries.
The recent results build on discoveries from the early 20th century. Back then, two researchers ignited interest in boundary layer turbulence: German physicist Ludwig Prandtl, who has been called “the father of modern aerodynamics,” and Theodore von Kármán, a Hungarian-American engineer known as “the father of supersonic flight,” conducted wind tunnel experiments.
Prandtl and von Kármán also discovered that the inertial layer’s mean velocity was a logarithmic function of the distance from the boundary. “For the last 100 years, various formulas for the flow in the distinct layers have been developed,” starting with that result, Birnir says. His and his colleagues’ recent paper, which was published in Physical Review Research, “combines all of these results in a single theory.
Townsend, an Australian mechanical engineer, introduced the attached eddy hypothesis in 1976. “Basically, what he said was that what’s carrying energy away from the boundary into the flow is continuum, or nested, eddies,” Birnir says. The smaller eddies feed energy into the bigger ones, and the largest eddies “reach all the way from the boundary to the inertial layer.”
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