Exponential growth of lifetime of localized turbulence with its extent in channel flow

The transition to turbulence in wall-bounded flows, for example pipe flow, plane Couette flow and channel flow, initially occurs as localized clusters of turbulence. It is well known that these localized structures are transient and decay in a memoryless process. In this paper we investigate the relationship between the extent of a localized structure and its lifetime. By performing numerical simulations of channel flow with small spanwise periodicity we produce streamwise-localized but spanwise-extended turbulence, turbulent 'puffs' instead of spots. We vary the spanwise periodzation length as the parameter of its extent to show that the lifetime of turbulent 'puffs' increases double-exponentially as a function of the Reynolds number for any spanwise extent. It is also shown that the lifetime increases exponentially as a function of the spanwise size when it is not large.