Sensitivity analysis of optimal transient growth for turbulent boundary layers

Structural approaches based on modal decomposition of the flow dynamics have gained acceptance for a wide variety of turbulent shear flows. In this context, a singular value decomposition associated with a governing operator, aiming to model the linear amplification of coherent structures, is used to reproduce some fundamental motions in a turbulent boundary layer. In particular, as already found by Cossu et al. (2009), elongated streaky structures scaled in inner and outer units are identified. The sensitivity of these singular values to a mean flow modification is analysed. It is illustrated that the linear amplification of very large-scales which populate the outer motion is not affected when the leading singular value associated with the inner layer is damped. Moreover, we notice that the resulting optimal mean flow deviation is consistent with findings of Xu et al. (2007) in which the active control of a turbulent boundary layer is studied through direct numerical simulations.