Investigating the turbulent to laminar flow transition across a permeable wall using Refractive-Index Matching (RIM)

Permeable boundaries occur in a variety of natural environments. Turbulent flow overlying such boundaries is perhaps one of the most common, yet one of the most complex, types of flow found in any geophysical environment (e.g. river beds, forests). Unlike flows over impermeable walls, which have been widely studied, the characteristics of flow generated by permeable walls is relatively poorly understood. This work considers the flow both above and within a permeable bed focusing on the linkage between the free flow and the Darcian layer through an experimental investigation of the transitional (Brinkman) layer. To overcome the challenges related with the complex geometry of porous structures, a Refractive-Index-Matching (RIM) approach was employed to gain full optical access to the fluid flowing across a permeable wall. A permeable wall, made by packing acrylic spheres in a cubic arrangement, was immersed in an aqueous solution of Sodium Iodide (NaI). With such an arrangement the refractive index of the two phases was accurately matched, thus providing unobstructed optical access within the permeable bed. Data was collected on the flow across the wall interface and the turbulent attributes of these surface-subsurface interactions were quantified. The first part of this paper highlights the fundamental differences between flows above permeable and impermeable beds, and examines the implications of these differences for the mechanisms of mass and momentum exchange. For example, permeable beds have significant injection and suction events that move fluid across the interface, and result in an absence of low-speed streaks that are ubiquitous over impermeable beds. Additionally, in contrast to flow over impermeable surfaces, ejection events dominate over sweep events above a permeable wall, this has significant implications for the mechanisms of drag and thus energy dissipation that occur within the transition layer. The second part of the paper examines the complexity of flow within the pores of the transition layer. This new data suggests that the manner in which the transition layer is commonly represented in current numerical models may be inappropriate, and that future work must better account for flow across this dynamic interface.