Correlative analysis of organised structures in turbulent jets

An approach to characterise jets by analysing the locations of large-scale instantaneous structures is presented. Planar imaging is used to identify instantaneous large-scale structures in flow fields. ??Correlation Images?? are generated from the auto-correlation of identified large-scale structures in instantaneous planar images. A ??Structure Correlation Survey?? is produced by the sum of Correlation Images from an ensemble. A Structure Correlation Survey provides a measure of the underlying large-scale structures, namely the characteristic distances and angles between large-scale structures, number densities of large-scale structures in the image field and their dominant modes of flow. The approach is assessed analytically and applied to experimental data. Four generic flow patterns are identified and used individually, or in combination, to classify jet flows. Results show that the proposed method can be used successfully to characterise jet flows based on large-scale structures in an instantaneous flow field.