Reversion of turbulent to laminar flow

Abstract

It has been shown experimentally that quite large departures occur from the universal inner-law velocity distribution in the presence of severe favourable pressure gradients in turbulent boundary layers and that these departures are associated with the tendency for the turbulent boundary layer to revert to a laminar state. From the measurements a criterion for the onset of reverse transition has been deduced in terms of the mean shear-stress gradient in the wall region of the flow. Experiments in fully developed pipe and channel flows suggest that the proposed criterion may be quite generally applicable to all fully turbulent shear flows.