Relaminarization under stationary vortices

Flow visualization reveals that a turbulent boundary layer is relaminarized when stationary streamwise vortices are introduced. Following a suggestion of Balle, the vortices are stabilized by large streamwise ``Karman'' grooves in a wavy wall. In a water tunnel, upstream vortex generators place a large streamwise vortex in the middle of each groove, at the stationary point where Prandtl's vortex force vanishes. According to a theory by Cotel, the wall fluxes of a turbulent boundary layer should decline to laminar values under such ``persistent'' vortices. The observed relaminarization is consistent with this theory and with previous measurements of heat transfer by Touel and Balle. However, the structure of the transverse flow resembles the cats-eye pattern of a temporal shear layer rather than the anticipated von Karman wake. The cats-eye pattern corresponds to the forced shear layers of Oster-Wygnanski and Roberts, who found that the Reynolds stresses and mixing rate also decline to laminar values.