Detection of small-scale/large-scale interactions in turbulent wall-bounded flows

A study of the combined effect of outer-layer large-scale superposition, amplitude modulation, and distortions on the near-wall dynamics of turbulent wall-bounded flows is presented. A novel approach to detect the amplitude modulation is introduced that more clearly reveals this phenomenon compared to existing techniques. The study also shows that scale separation by the empirical mode decomposition approach and by conventional spectral filtering yields similar conclusions about the interaction mechanisms.