Instability of the roll-streak structure induced by background turbulence in pretransitional Couette flow

Although the roll-streak structure is ubiquitous in both observations and simulations of pretransitional wall-bounded shear flow, this structure is linearly stable if the idealization of laminar flow is made. Lacking an instability, the large transient growth of the roll-streak structure has been invoked to explain its appearance as resulting from chance occurrence in the background turbulence of perturbations configured to optimally excite it. However, there is an alternative interpretation for the role of free-stream turbulence in the genesis of the roll-streak structure, which is that the background turbulence interacts with the roll-streak structure to destabilize it. Statistical state dynamics (SSD) provides analysis methods for studying instabilities of this type that arise from interaction between the coherent and incoherent components of turbulence. SSD in the form of a closure at second order is used in this work to analyze the cooperative eigenmodes arising from interaction between the coherent streamwise invariant component and the incoherent background component of turbulence. In pretransitional Couette flow a manifold of stable modes with roll-streak form is found to exist in the presence of low-intensity background turbulence. The least stable mode of this manifold is destabilized at a critical value of a parameter controlling the background turbulence intensity and a finite-amplitude roll-streak structure arises from this instability through a bifurcation in this parameter. Although this bifurcation has analytical expression only in the infinite ensemble formulation of second order SSD, referred in this work as the S3T system, it is closely reflected in numerical simulations of both the dynamically similar quasilinear system, referred to as the restricted nonlinear (RNL) system, as well as in the full Navier-Stokes equations. This correspondence is verified using ensemble implementations of the RNL system and the Navier-Stokes equations. The S3T system also predicts a second bifurcation at a higher value of the turbulent excitation parameter that results in destabilization of the finite-amplitude roll-streak equilibria. This second bifurcation is shown to lead first to time dependence of the roll-streak structure in the S3T system and then to chaotic fluctuation corresponding to minimal channel turbulence. This transition scenario is also verified in simulations of the RNL system and of the Navier-Stokes equations. This bifurcation from a finite-amplitude roll-streak equilibrium provides a direct route to the turbulent state through the S3T roll-streak instability.