Review of Coherent Structures in Turbulent Free Shear Flows and Their Possible Influence on Computational Methods

A review of selected experiments on coherent structures in turbulent shear flows is performed. Different experimental approaches (conditional averages, filtering techniques, wavelets, linear stochastic estimation and proper orthogonal decomposition, etc.) are illustrated and their links with computations (LES, DNS, SDM, etc.) is emphasized. It is particularly shown that some kind of universal behavior of the background turbulence can be retrieved from these various experimental methods. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.