Experimental Study of Turbulent-Wake Expansion from a Surface Ship

摘要

We studied the time dynamics of a turbulent region excited by a moving surface vessel in a field experiment. The time dependences of the geometrical sizes of the turbulent region are obtained, and it is shown that the time dependence of the width of the turbulent wake at the initial stage is close to the power-law function with an exponent of 0.4 for different experiments (the depth of the wake remaining practically constant). In the semiempirical turbulence theory, we suggested a qualitative model describing the process of the initial expansion of a ship wake as a diffusion of a one-dimensional layer of turbulized liquid due to a pulsed source.