Turbulent windprint on a liquid surface

Abstract: We investigate the effect of a light turbulent wind on a liquid surface, below the onset of wave generation. In that regime, the liquid surface is populated by small disorganised deformations elongated in the streamwise direction. Formally identified recently by Paquier et al. (2015), the deformations that occur below the wave onset were named wrinkles. We provide here a theoretical framework for this wrinkle regime, using the viscous response of a free surface liquid submitted to arbitrary normal and tangential interfacial stresses at its upper boundary. We relate the spatio-temporal spectrum of the surface deformations to that of the applied interfacial pressure and shear stress fluctuations. For that, we evaluate the spatio-temporal statistics of the turbulent forcing using Direct Numerical Simulation of a turbulent air channel flow, assuming no coupling between the air and the liquid flows. Combining theory and numerical simulation, we thus obtain synthetic wrinkles that reproduce previous experimental investigations. We show that the wrinkles are a multi-scale superposition of random wakes generated by the turbulent fluctuations. They result mainly from the nearly isotropic pressure fluctuations generated in the boundary layer, rather than from the elongated shear stress fluctuations. The wrinkle regime described in this paper naturally arises as the viscous-saturated asymptotic of the inviscid growth theory of Phillips (1957). Experiments indicate that the onset of exponential wave growth depends on the liquid viscosity. Our theory suggests that the empirical criterion for the onset is satisfied when the wrinkle amplitude reaches a given fraction of the viscous sublayer thickness. It indicates that the turbulent fluctuations near the onset may play a role in the triggering of exponential wave growth.