Direct test of a nonlinear constitutive equation for simple turbulent shear flows using DNS data

Several nonlinear constitutive equations have been proposed to overcome the limitations of the linear eddy-viscosity models to describe complex turbulent flows. These nonlinear equations have often been compared to experimental data through the outputs of numerical models. Here we perform a priori analysis of nonlinear eddy-viscosity models using direct numerical simulation (DNS) of simple shear flows. In this paper, the constitutive equation is directly checked using a tensor projection which involves several invariants of the flow. This provides a 3 terms development which is exact for 2D flows, and a best approximation for 3D flows. We provide the quadratic nonlinear constitutive equation for the near-wall region of simple shear flows using DNS data, and estimate their coefficients. We show that these coefficients have several common properties for the different simple shear flow databases considered. We also show that in the central region of pipe flows, where the shear rate is very small, the coefficients of the constitutive equation diverge, indicating the failure of this representation for vanishing shears. (C) 2006 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.