Quasi-coherent structures in the turbulent boundary layer. I - Status report on a community-wide summary of the data
A review is presented of the approach, motivation and early results of a reevaluation of the knowledge collected by the research community during thirty years of research on the structure of turbulent boundary layers. Four distinctions or criteria concerning the need to improve the practices in this field are discussed: data versus inferences, possible versus actual versus significant events, one structure versus many, and one or two flows versus the totality of data. Attention given to the known quasi-coherent structures show that three factors significantly reduce the information available from laboratory data as a basis for forming a complete model of the quasi-coherent structure in the turbulent boundary layer: (1) the necessity to ensemble average probe output with resulting loss of phase information, (2) the inability to see more than one or two of the various types of structures simultaneously, and (3) the inability to see the spatial relations between the various quasi-coherent structures resulting from (1) and (2).