This is the first book specifically designed to offer the student a
smooth transitionary course between elementary fluid dynamics
(which gives only last-minute attention to turbulence) and the
professional literature on turbulent flow, where an advanced
viewpoint is assumed. The subject of turbulence, the most
forbidding in fluid dynamics, has usually proved treacherous to the
beginner, caught in the whirls and eddies of its nonlinearities and
statistical imponderables. This is the first book specifically
designed to offer the student a smooth transitionary course between
elementary fluid dynamics (which gives only last-minute attention
to turbulence) and the professional literature on turbulent flow,
where an advanced viewpoint is assumed. Moreover, the text has been
developed for students, engineers, and scientists with different
technical backgrounds and interests. Almost all flows, natural and
man-made, are turbulent. Thus the subject is the concern of
geophysical and environmental scientists (in dealing with
atmospheric jet streams, ocean currents, and the flow of rivers,
for example), of astrophysicists (in studying the photospheres of
the sun and stars or mapping gaseous nebulae), and of engineers (in
calculating pipe flows, jets, or wakes). Many such examples are
discussed in the book. The approach taken avoids the difficulties
of advanced mathematical development on the one side and the morass
of experimental detail and empirical data on the other. As a result
of following its midstream course, the text gives the student a
physical understanding of the subject and deepens his intuitive
insight into those problems that cannot now be rigorously solved.
In particular, dimensional analysis is used extensively in dealing
with those problems whose exact solution is mathematically elusive.
Dimensional reasoning, scale arguments, and similarity rules are
introduced at the beginning and are applied throughout. A
discussion of Reynolds stress and the kinetic theory of gases
provides the contrast needed to put mixing-length theory into
proper perspective: the authors present a thorough comparison
between the mixing-length models and dimensional analysis of shear
flows. This is followed by an extensive treatment of vorticity
dynamics, including vortex stretching and vorticity budgets. Two
chapters are devoted to boundary-free shear flows and well-bounded
turbulent shear flows. The examples presented include wakes, jets,
shear layers, thermal plumes, atmospheric boundary layers, pipe and
channel flow, and boundary layers in pressure gradients. The
spatial structure of turbulent flow has been the subject of
analysis in the book up to this point, at which a compact but
thorough introduction to statistical methods is given. This
prepares the reader to understand the stochastic and spectral
structure of turbulence. The remainder of the book consists of
applications of the statistical approach to the study of turbulent
transport (including diffusion and mixing) and turbulent spectra.
General
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