Turbulence drag modification with the Transpiration-Resistance Model.

A set of boundary conditions called the Transpiration-Resistance Model (TRM) are investigated in their ability to change the drag of turbulent flow by altering the near-wall conditions. The TRM has been previously proposed by Lacis et al. (2020) as a means of representing the effect of surface micro-textures on flows. It encompasses conventional Navier-slip boundary conditions relating the streamwise and spanwise velocities to their respective shears through the slip lengths $l_x$ and $l_z$. In addition, it derives a transpiration condition accounting for the changes induced in the wall-normal velocity by expressing it in terms of variations of wall-parallel shear through the transpiration lengths $m_x$ and $m_z$. The transpiration is essential in capturing the behavior of drag-increasing surfaces such as roughness. Greater levels of drag increase occur when more transpiration takes place at the boundary, with the transpiration itself observed to be strongly coupled to the spanwise shear component. A virtual-origin framework proposed by Ibrahim et al. (2020) and originating from the work of Luchini et al. (1991) is leveraged to identify a regime of drag modification where near-wall turbulence retains a structure similar to that of canonical smooth-wall turbulence. The TRM is able to reproduce the effect of a homogeneous and structured roughness up to ${k^+}\,{\approx18}$. Moreover, a linear relation is found between the imposed transpiration lengths in the TRM and the roughness function, providing some promise for drag prediction of transitionally rough surfaces.