Near wall patch representation of wall bounded turbulence

Recent experimental and computational studies indicate that near wall turbulent flows can be characterized by universal small scale autonomous dynamics that are modulated by large scale structures. We formulate numerical simulations of near wall turbulence in a small domain localized to the boundary, whose size scales in viscous units. To mimic the environment in which the near wall turbulence evolves, our formulation accounts for the flux of mean momentum through the upper boundary of the domain. Comparisons of the model's two dimensional energy spectra and low order single-point statistics with the corresponding quantities computed from zero and mild favorable pressure gradient direct numerical simulations indicate it successfully captures the dynamics of the small scale near wall turbulence.