Opposition-control of the energetic cycle of near wall streaks in wall-bounded turbulence, using numerical approaches, has shown promise for drag reduction. For practical implementation, real-time opposition control is only realizable if there is a degree of coherence between the turbulent velocities passing a sensor and the target point within the flow; for practicality, a sensor (and actuator) should be wall-based to avoid parasitic drag. As such, we here inspect the feasibility of real-time control of the near wall cycle, by considering the coherence between a measurable wall-quantity, being the wall-shear stress fluctuations, and the streamwise and wall-normal velocity fluctuations in a turbulent boundary layer. Synchronized spatial and temporal velocity data from two direct numerical simulations and a fine large eddy simulation at Re_τ≈590 and 2000 are employed. This study shows that the spectral energy of the streamwise velocity fluctuations that is stochastically incoherent with wall signals is independent of Reynolds number in the near wall region (up to the viscous-scaled wall-normal height z⁺≈20). Consequently, the streamwise energy-fraction that is stochastically wall-coherent grows with Reynolds number due to the increasing range of energetic large scales. This thus implies that a wall-based control system has the ability to manipulate a larger portion of the total turbulence energy at off-wall locations, at higher Reynolds numbers, while the efficacy of predicting/targeting the small scales of the near wall cycle remains indifferent with varying Reynolds number. Coherence values of 0.55 and 0.4 were found between the streamwise and wall-normal velocity fluctuations at the near wall peak in the energy spectrogram, respectively, and the streamwise fluctuating friction velocity. These coherence values, which are considerably lower than 1 (maximum possible coherence) suggest that a closed-loop drag reduction scheme targeting near wall cycle streaks alone (based on sensed friction velocity fluctuations) will be of limited success in practice.

Very-large-scale structures in pipe flows are characterized using an extended Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD)-based estimation. Synchronized non-time-resolved Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) and time-resolved, multi-point hot-wire measurements are integrated for the estimation of turbulent structures in a pipe flow at friction Reynolds numbers of 9500 and 20000. This technique enhances the temporal resolution of PIV, thus providing a time-resolved description of the dynamics of the large-scale motions. The experiments are carried out in the CICLoPE facility. A novel criterion for the statistical characterization of the large-scale motions is introduced, based on the time-resolved dynamically-estimated POD time coefficients. It is shown that high-momentum events are less persistent than low-momentum events, and tend to occur closer to the wall. These differences are further enhanced with increasing Reynolds number.