Structure and mechanism of turbulence under dynamical restriction in plane Poiseuille flow

The perspective of statistical state dynamics (SSD) has been applied to the study of mechanisms underlying turbulence in various physical systems. An example application of SSD is that of the second order closure, referred to as stochastic structural stability theory (S3T), which has provided insight into the dynamics of wall turbulence and the emergence and maintenance of the roll/streak structure. This closure eliminates nonlinear interactions among the perturbations restricting nonlinearity to that of the mean equation and interaction between the mean and perturbations. Simulations at modest $Re$ reveal that the essential features of wall-turbulence dynamics are retained with the dynamics restricted in this manner. Here this restriction of the dynamics is used to obtain a closely related dynamical system, referred to as the restricted non-linear (RNL) system, which is used to study the structure and dynamics of turbulence in plane Poiseuille flow at moderately high $Re$. Remarkably, the RNL system spontaneously limits the support of its turbulence to a small set of streamwise Fourier components giving rise to a natural minimal representation of its turbulence dynamics. Although greatly simplified, this RNL turbulence exhibits natural-looking structures and statistics. Surprisingly, even when a further truncation of the perturbation support to a single streamwise component is imposed the RNL system continues to produce self-sustaining turbulent structure and dynamics. The turbulent flow in RNL simulations at the Reynolds numbers studied is dominated by the roll/streak structure in the buffer layer and very-large-scale structure (VLSM) in the outer layer. Diagnostics of the structure, spectrum and energetics of RNL and DNS turbulence are used to demonstrate that the roll/streak dynamics supporting the turbulence in the buffer and log-layer is essentially similar in RNL and DNS.