Role of Algebraic Instability In Transition and Turbulence

One of the major challenges in turbulence research has been to explain how the turbulence is created and to describe and analyze the space-time behavior of the turbulent eddies. For wallbounded shear flows the pioneering experiments by Kline and his group (Kline et al. 1967, Kim et al., 1971) and by Corino and Brodkey (1969) brought out the special significance of the strongly intermittent processes in the near-wall region during turbulent bursting and identified alternating low- and high-speed flow regions, “streaks”, to be the predominant flow structures there. The oscillations and lift-up of a low-speed streak were seen to initiate a rapid outflow (ejection) of fluid from the wall region and a subsequent breakup of the streak.