The Plane Wake of a Cylinder: An Estimate of the Pressure Strain Rate Tensor

Journal article, 1994

The modelling of the pressure strain rate terms is an important issue in the improvement of the generality of closure models for the Reynolds stress transport (RST) equations. A part of these efforts is to provide accurate experimental information on the pressure-strain rate tensor, which in turn requires equally accurate information on the dissipation and diffusion tensors. Here the far wake of a cylinder was studied in order to enable the required balances of the RST equations. The experimental results indicate a nonisotropic dissipation tensor, and show the energy redistribution between the different components as described by the pressure-strain rate correlations. Comparisons are made between the experimentally determined pressure-strain rate distributions and the corresponding distributions predicted by closure models.