PIV studies on turbulence structure in air/water interface with wind-induced water waves

When wind appears over the free surface, water waves and turbulence are generated by an interfacial shear stress. In particular, turbulent diffusion promotes significantly mass and momentum transport beneath the interface between the water and air significantly in ocean and lakes, and thus it is very important for global environment problems to reveal such turbulence property and coherent structure. Simultaneous measurements of velocities and free-surface elevation allow us to conduct reasonably the phase analysis of the coherent structure in interfacial shear layer. Furthermore, multi-point measurements such as PIV are very powerful to detect the space-time structure of coherent motions. Therefore, in the present study, we developed a specially designed PIV system which can measure the velocity components and surface-elevation fluctuation simultaneously by using two sets of high-speed cameras to reveal the coherent structure in the interfacial shear layer.