The turbulence vorticity as a window to the physics of friction-drag reduction by oscillatory wall motion

•Illumination of drag-reduction mechanisms due to spanwise oscillatory wall motion.•Focus on phase-averaged turbulence statistics in channel flow at Reτ=1025.•Elucidation of mechanisms linking drag reduction, turbulent vorticity and enstrophy.•Provision of a comprehensive conceptual view of the drag-reduction process. DNS data for channel flow, subjected to spanwise (in-plane) wall oscillations at a friction Reynolds number of 1025, are used to examine the turbulence interactions that cause the observed substantial reduction in drag provoked by the forcing. Following a review of pertinent interactions between the forcing-induced unsteady Stokes strain and the Reynolds stresses, identified in previous work by the present authors, attention is focused on the equations governing the components of the enstrophy, with particular emphasis placed on the wall-normal and the spanwise components. The specific objective is to study the mechanisms by which the Stokes strain modifies the enstrophy field, and thus the turbulent stresses. As such, the present analysis sheds fresh light on the drag-reduction processes, illuminating the interactions from a different perspective than that analysed in previous work. The investigation focuses on the periodic rise and fall in the drag and phase-averaged properties during the actuation cycle at sub-optimal actuation conditions, in which case the drag oscillates by around ±2% around the time-averaged 20% drag-reduction margin. The results bring out the important role played by specific strain-related production terms in the enstrophy-component equations, and also identifies vortex tilting/stretching in regions of high skewness as being responsible for the observed strong increase in the spanwise enstrophy components during the drag-reduction phase. Simultaneously, the wall-normal enstrophy component, closely associated with near-wall streak intensity, diminishes, mainly as a result of a reduction in a production term that involves the correlation between wall-normal vorticity fluctuations and the spanwise derivative of wall-normal-velocity fluctuations, which pre-multiplies the streamwise shear strain.