Vortex statistics in turbulent channel flows*

In order to address the role of coherent structures in wall bounded turbulence, we study the statistics of morphological and kinematic properties of vortices, such as circulation, radius and height distributions. To accomplish that, we introduce a novel vortex identification method named as "vorticity curvature criterion" which is based on the local properties of the vorticity field. We furthermore employ a background subtraction procedure to remove shearing background effects expected to be present in the topology of the streamwise/wall-normal plane flow configurations. We discuss, through a comparative study of performance with the usual swirling strength criterion, and extending the previous analyses to the detection of coherent structures in the spanwise/wall normal planes, isotropization issues for the paradigmatic case of numerical turbulent channel flows.