Universal characterization of wall turbulence for fluids with strong property variations

Wall-bounded turbulence involving mixing of scalars, such as temperature or concentration fields, play an important role in many engineering applications. In applications with large temperature or concentration differences, the variation of scalar dependent thermos physical properties can be strong. In such cases the strong coupling between energy and momentum alters the conventional behavior of turbulence. This alteration results in peculiar momentum and heat transfer characteristics, for which conventional scaling laws for constant property flows fail and cannot be applied. The aim of this work is to characterize wall bounded turbulence for fluids that have large near-wall gradients in thermos physical properties. The focus is on the variable inertia effects at the low-Mach number limit without the influence of buoyancy.