Spatiotemporal intermittency measurements in a gas-phase near-isotropic turbulence using high-speed DPIV and wavelet analysis

Recently, Shy and his co-workers developed a new turbulent flow system that used a pair of counter-rotating fans and perforated plates to generate stationary near-isotropic turbulence, as verified by LDV measurements, for the study of premixed turbulent combustion processes. This paper evaluates for the first time the correlations between spatial and temporal properties of small-scale intermittency in such a fan-stirred near-isotropic turbulence. These spatiotemporal properties are obtained simultaneously via high-speed digital particle image velocimetry together with wavelet analyses. It is found that the wavelet energy spectra in the inertial range of near-isotropic region all exhibit a slope of nearly -5/3 which spans at least from 3Hz to 100Hz. Characteristic scales, including the integral time and length scales, Taylor microscales, and viscous dissipation scales, are identified without the use of Taylor hypothesis. Thus, a direct evaluation of Taylor hypothesis in near-isotropic turbulence with zero mean velocity can be made. From variations of the flatness factor, equivalent to the 4th order velocity structure function, in the spatial and time domains, it is found that the characteristic spatial and temporal intermittent scales of intense vorticity structures in the dissipation range of the fan-stirred near-isotropic turbulence occur around 5-8η and τ_k, respectively, where η and τ_k are the Kolmogorov length and time scales. These results are useful for further study of particle settling in turbulence, a problem of both engineering and geophysical interest.