Mach number and wall thermal boundary condition effects on near-wall compressible turbulence

• DOI: 10.1017/jfm.2025.66
• Publication Date: 2025-04-04T05:20:21Z
• Authors: Akanksha Baranwal; Diego A. Donzis; Rodney D.W. Bowersox

We investigate the effects of thermal boundary conditions and Mach number on turbulence close to walls. In particular, we study the near-wall asymptotic behaviour for adiabatic and pseudo-adiabatic walls, and compare to the asymptotic behaviour recently found near isothermal cold walls (Baranwal et al. 2022. J. Fluid Mech.933, A28). This is done by analysing a new large database of highly-resolved direct numerical simulations of turbulent channels with different wall thermal conditions and centreline Mach numbers. We observe that the asymptotic power-law behaviour of Reynolds stresses as well as heat fluxes does change with both centreline Mach number and thermal condition at the wall. Power-law exponents transition from their analytical expansion for solenoidal fields to those for non-solenoidal field as the Mach number is increased, though this transition is found to be dependent on the thermal boundary conditions. The correlation coefficients between velocity and temperature are also found to be affected by these factors. Consistent with recent proposals on universal behaviour of compressible turbulence, we find that dilatation at the wall is the key scaling parameter for these power-law exponents, providing a universal functional law that can provide a basis for general models of near-wall behaviour.