Symmetry related dynamics in parallel shear flows

Abstract

Parallel shear flows come with continuous symmetries of translation in the downstream and spanwise direction. As a consequence, flow states that differ in their spanwise or downstream location but are otherwise identical are dynamically equivalent. In the case of travelling waves, this trivial degree of freedom can be removed by going to a frame of reference that moves with the state, thereby turning the travelling wave in the laboratory frame to a fixed point in the comoving frame of reference. We here discuss a general method by which the translational displacements can be removed also for more complicated and dynamically active states and demonstrate its application for several examples. For flows states in the asymptotic suction boundary layer we show that in the case of the long-period oscillatory edge state we can find local phase speeds which remove the fast oscillations and reveal the slow vortex dynamics underlying the burst phenomenon. For spanwise translating states we show that the method removes the drift but not the dynamical events that cause the big spanwise displacement. For a turbulent case we apply the method to the spanwise shifts and find slow components that are correlated over very long times. Calculations for plane Poiseuille flow show that the long correlations in the transverse motions are not special to the asymptotic suction boundary layer.