Effects of Wall Topology on Statistics of Cube-Roughened Wall Turbulence

In this work, we carried out roughness-resolved direct numerical simulations of cube-roughened turbulent channel flows to investigate the effects of aligned and staggered arrangements, element spacings, and element orientations on the statistics of rough-wall turbulence. The results show that the equivalent sandgrain roughness, Reynolds stresses and dispersive stresses are affected by element spacings and arrangements in different ways depending on the cube orientations. Placing the roughness elements in a staggered way in general increases the equivalent sandgrain roughness, unless when the element–element interaction is insignificant for the cube orientation with wakes of short length. As for the Reynolds normal stresses and the streamwise component of the dispersive stresses (both are normalized by the total friction velocity), placing the cube elements in a staggered way decreases their maximal values when compared with the aligned arrangements. As for the effects of element spacing on the equivalent sandgrain roughness and the maximums of the Reynolds normal stresses, similar trends are observed for different element orientations and arrangements when increasing the element spacing l/r (where r is the cube height) from 2.0 to 2.8. When further increasing the element spacing l / r from 2.8 to 3.5, however, different trends are observed for different element orientations. As for the dispersive stresses, greater maximal values of their streamwise components are observed for larger element spacing for all the considered cube-roughened surfaces. For the turbulence statistics in the wake of the cube element, certain similarities are observed for different element spacings.