Invariant Analysis of Turbulent Pipe Flow

The anisotropy analysis of Lumley provides a useful tool to quantify the degree of anisotropy in turbulent flows. Also included in the analysis are relations which may be used to check if the flow is axisymmetric or two-dimensional. However, the method does not provide any scale information about the structures. The analysis has therefore been extended here to Fourier space, which allows scale information to be derived. The method was applied to fully developed pipe flow and it was shown that the large-scale motion is everywhere close to axisymmetric. The intermediate scales are strongly influenced by the restrictions posed by the pipe walls. At the centre line, the flow structure appears axisymmetric at all scales, but the measurement sindicate that true axisymmetry is lost very quickly away from the centre line. The structure of the smallest scales could not be determined reliably due to a singularity in the analysis which develops as the scales go to zero.