Turbulent plane Couette flow at moderately high Reynolds number

A new set of numerical simulations of turbulent plane Couette flow in a large box of dimension (20 pi h; 2h; 6 pi h /at Reynolds number. (Re-tau) = 125, 180, 250 and 550 is described and compared with simulations at lower Reynolds numbers, Poiseuille flows and experiments. The simulations present a logarithmic near-wall layer and are used to verify and revise previously known results. It is confirmed that the fluctuation intensities in the streamwise and spanwise directions do not scale well in wall units. The scaling failure occurs both near to and away from the wall. On the contrary, the wall-normal intensity scales in inner units in the near-wall region and in outer units in the core region. The spectral ridge found by Hoyas & Jimenez (Phys. Fluids, vol. 18, 2003, 011702) for the turbulent Poiseuille flow can also be seen in the present flow. Away from the wall, very large-scale motions are found spanning through all the length of the channel. The statistics of these simulations can be downloaded from the webpage of the Chair of Fluid Dynamics. This work was partially supported by the German Science Foundation (DFG) under the grant number KH 257/2-1 (2010). The computations of the new simulations were made possible by a generous grant of computer time from the FUCHS cluster at the University of Frankfurt-am-Main, the SuperMUC Petascale System at Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) and the supercomputation center of the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia. We are grateful to Messrs Tsukuhara, Kawamura, Shingai, Bernardini, Pirozzoli and Orlandi for providing us with copies of their original data and to Mr P. Raga for his help in the preparation of figure 7. S. H. is indebted to J. Jimenez. Avsarkisov, V.; Hoyas Calvo, S.; Oberlack, M.; García Galache, JP. (2014). Turbulent plane Couette flow at moderately high Reynolds number. Journal of Fluid Mechanics. 751:1-10. https://doi.org/10.1017/jfm.2014.323 Tillmark, N. 1995 Experiments on transition and turbulence in plane Couette flow. PhD thesis, KTH, Royal Institute of Technology. Moser, R. D., Kim, J., & Mansour, N. N. (1999). Direct numerical simulation of turbulent channel flow up to Reτ=590. Physics of Fluids, 11(4), 943-945. doi:10.1063/1.869966 KITOH, O., NAKABYASHI, K., & NISHIMURA, F. (2005). Experimental study on mean velocity and turbulence characteristics of plane Couette flow: low-Reynolds-number effects and large longitudinal vortical structure. Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 539(-1), 199. doi:10.