ON CONSISTENCY CONDITIONS FOR ROTATING TURBULENT FLOWS

Consistency conditions for the prediction of turbulent flows in a rota ting frame are examined. It is shown that the dissipation rate should vanish along with the eddy viscosity in the limit of rapid rotations. The latter result is also true when the eddy viscosity is anisotropic and formally follows from the explicit algebraic stress approximation as well as from a phenomenological treatment. The former result has be en built into the modeled dissipation rate equation of recent turbulen ce models where the second result has been violated. In fact, some of these models have the eddy viscosity going to infinity while the dissi pation rate vanishes, leading to an inconsistency. For consistency, bo th of these conditions must be satisfied. The implications of these re sults for turbulence modeling are thoroughly discussed. (C) 1998 Ameri can Institute of Physics.