Organized structures in turbulent shear flow have been observed both in the laboratory and in the atmosphere and ocean. Recent work on modelling such structures in a temporally developing, horizontally homogeneous turbulent free shear layer (Liu & Merkine 19766) has been extended to the spatially developing mixing layer, there being no available rational transformation between the two nonlinear problems. We consider the kinetic energy development of the mean flow, large-scale structure and finegrained turbulence with a conditional average, supplementing the usual time average, to separate the non-random from the random part of the fluctuations. The integrated form of the energy equations and the accompanying shape assumptions are used to derive ‘ amplitude ’ equations for the mean flow, characterized by the shear layer thickness, the non-random and the random components of flow (which are characterized by their respective energy densities). The closure problem was overcome by the shape assumptions which entered into the interaction integrals: the instability-wavelike large-scale structure was taken to be two-dimensional and the local vertical distribution function was obtained by solving the Rayleigh equation for various local frequencies; the vertical shape of the mean stresses of the fine-grained turbulence was estimated by making use of experimental results; the vertical shapes of the wave-induced stresses were calculated locally from their corresponding equations.
Small scale structure of homogeneous turbulent shear flow