Turbulent boundary layers over flat plates and rotating disks-The legacy of von Kármán: A Stockholm perspective

Many of the findings and ideas of von Kármán are still of interest to the fluid dynamics community. For instance, his result that the mean velocity distribution in turbulent flows has a logarithmic behavior with respect to the distance from the centreline is still a cornerstone for everybody working in wall-bounded turbulence and was first presented to an international audience in Stockholm at the Third International Congress for Applied Mechanics in 1930. In this paper we discuss this result and also how the so-called von Kármán constant can be determined in a new simple way. We also discuss the possibility of a second (outer) maximum of the streamwise velocity fluctuations, a result that was implicit in some of the assumptions proposed by von Kármán.