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Turbulent flows. (English) Zbl 0966.76002

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. xxxiv, 771 p. (2000).
This comprehensive textbook presents an introduction to fundamentals and modelling of turbulent flows. The treatment of the material is quite modern, and is suitable to engineering students at graduate level. The book consists of two main parts and 10 appendices.
Part I “Fundamentals” discusses basic properties of turbulent flows. The material of this part is divided into seven chapters which correspond to traditional topics: 1. Introduction; 2. The equations of fluid motion; 3. The statistical description of turbulent flows; 4. Mean-flow equations; 5. Free shear flows; 6. The scales of turbulent motion; 7. Wall flows. The emphasis is put on statistical theory, production and dissipation of turbulent kinetic energy, energy cascades, Kolmogorov hypotheses, and on the spectral description of homogeneous turbulence in terms of Fourier modes in wavenumber space. The author also gives a detailed theory of wall-bounded flows, including transport equations for Reynolds stresses and their balance in turbulent boundary layers.
Part II “Modelling and simulation” deals with various methods of simulation of turbulent flows presented in the following chapters: 8. An introduction to modelling and simulation; 9. Direct numerical simulation; 10. Turbulent-viscosity models; 11. Reynolds-stress and related models; 12. PDF methods; 13. Large-eddy simulation. Among many standard and now classical topics, the author discusses here some advanced methods such as rapid distortion theory or elliptic relaxation models proposed in the literature less than ten years ago.
The text contains a large number of exercises many of which are rather challenging and contain the more technical material complementing the body text. The interested reader can also find many mathematical details in appendices (first of all, properties of tensors, Dirac delta functions, Fourier transforms, spectral representation of random processes, and the derivation of Eulerian PDF equations). A rich bibliography which includes state-of-the-art works published up to 1998, and very useful author and subject indices complete the book.
In reviewer’s opinion, this well-organized and clearly written book can be highly recommended to students and researchers with an interest in turbulence, and to all teaching the subject.

MSC:

76-02 Research exposition (monographs, survey articles) pertaining to fluid mechanics
76Fxx Turbulence
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