Do wildflower strips enhance pest control in organic cabbage?

Within this project we assess whether wildflower strips and companion plants increase the control of cabbage pests Plutella xylostella L. (Lepidoptera: Plutellidae), Mamestra brassicae L. (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae) and Pieris rapae L. (Lepidoptera: Pieridae) by (1) naturally occurring parasitoids and predators and (2) mass‐releasedn Trichogramma brassciae (Bezdenko) (Hymenoptera: Trichogrammatidae) parasitoids. Two organic cabbage fields were used for this study: adjacent to each field a wildflower strip was sown and companion plants (Centaurea cyanus L. (Asteraceae)) intermixed within the crop. Within each field ~15,000 M. brassicae eggs were placed out to determine the parasitism rates by mass‐released T. brassicae and to assess the levels of egg predation. Over 1,000 lepidopteran larvae were collected and screened for hymenopteran and tachinid parasitoid DNA using a multiplex PCR assay. Invertebrate generalist predators (n=1,063) were collected for DNA‐based gut content analysis. The wildflower strip had a significant positive effect on M. brassicae egg parasitism rates as rates increased 5‐fold in the vicinity to the strip. Moreover, companion plants enhanced invertebrate predation on M. brassicae eggs. Both, the release of T. brassicae and the use of companion plants, however, did not significantly increase egg parasitism rates. The infestation of plants by caterpillars increased with distance to the wildflower strip and there was a trend of decreasing larval parasitism rates with distance to the strip. Currently the invertebrate predators are being molecularly analysed to assess predation on unparasitized and parasitized lepidopteran pests

Turbulence transition in the asymptotic suction boundary layer

We study the transition to turbulence in the asymptotic suction boundary layer (ASBL) by direct numerical simulation. Tracking the motion of trajectories intermediate between laminar and turbulent states we can identify the invariant object inside the laminar-turbulent boundary, the edge state. In small domains, the flow behaves like a travelling wave over short time intervals. On longer times one notes that the energy shows strong bursts at regular time intervals. During the bursts the streak structure is lost, but it reforms, translated in the spanwise direction by half the domain size. Varying the suction velocity allows to embed the flow into a family of flows that interpolate between plane Couette flow and the ASBL. Near the plane Couette limit, the edge state is a travelling wave. Increasing the suction, the travelling wave and a symmetry-related copy of it undergo a saddle-node infinite-period (SNIPER) bifurcation that leads to bursting and discrete-symmetry shifts. In wider domains, the structures localize in the spanwise direction, and the flow in the active region is similar to the one in small domains. There are still periodic bursts at which the flow structures are shifted, but the shift-distance is no longer connected to a discrete symmetry of the flow geometry. Two different states are found by edge tracking techniques, one where structures are shifted to the same side at every burst and one where they are alternatingly shifted to the left and to the right.Comment: Conference TSFP8, Poitiers 2013. TSFP-8 conference proceedings 2013, http://www.tsfp-conference.org/proceedings

Intense reynolds-stress events in turbulent ducts

The aim of the present work is to investigate the role of intense Reynolds shear-stress events in the generation of the secondary flow in turbulent ducts. We consider the connected regions of flow where the product of the instantaneous fluctuations of two velocity components is higher than a threshold based on the long-time turbulence statistics, in the spirit of the three-dimensional quadrant analysis proposed by Lozano-Durán et al. (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 694, 2012, pp. 100–130). We examine both the geometrical properties of these structures and their contribution to the mean in-plane velocity components, and we perfom a comparison with turbulent channel flow at similar Reynolds number. The contribution to a certain mean quantity is defined as the ensemble average over the detected coherent structures, weighted with their own occupied volume fraction. In the core region of the duct, the contribution of intense events to the wall-normal component of the mean velocity is in very good agreement with that in the channel, despite the presence of the secondary flow in the former. Additionally, the shapes of the three-dimensional objects do not differ significantly in both flows. In the corner region of the duct, the proximity of the walls affects both the geometrical properties of the coherent structures and the contribution to the mean component of the vertical velocity. However, such contribution is less relevant than that of the complementary portion of the flow not included in such objects. Our results show that strong Reynolds shear-stress events are affected by the presence of a corner but, despite the important role of these structures in the dynamics of wall-bounded turbulent flows, their contribution to the secondary flow is relatively low, both in the core and in the corner

Coherent structures in turbulent boundary layers over an airfoil

This preliminary study is concerned with the identification of three-dimensional coherent structures, defined as intense Reynolds-stress events, in the turbulent boundary layer developing over the suction side of a NACA4412 airfoil at a Reynolds number based on the chord lenght and the incoming velocity of Rec = 200, 000. The scientific interest for such flows originates from the non-uniform adverse pressure gradient that affects the boundary-layer development. Firstly, we assess different methods to identify the turbulent-non-turbulent interface, in order to exclude the irrotational region from the analysis. Secondly, we evaluate the contribution of the considered coherent structures to the enhanced wall-normal velocity, characteristic of adverse pressure gradients. Our results show that it is necessary to limit the detection of coherent structures to the turbulent region of the domain, and that the structures reveal qualitative differences between the contributions of intense events to the wall-normal velocity in adverse-pressure-gradient and zero-pressure-gradient turbulent boundary layers

Characterization of turbulent coherent structures in square duct flow

This work is aimed at a first characterization of coherent structures in turbulent square duct flows. Coherent structures are defined as connected components in the domain identified as places where a quantity of interest (such as Reynolds stress or vorticity) is larger than a prescribed non-uniform threshold. Firstly, we qualitatively discuss how a percolation analysis can be used to assess the effectiveness of the threshold function, and how it can be affected by statistical uncertainty. Secondly, various physical quantities that are expected to play an important role in the dynamics of the secondary flow of Prandtl's second kind are studied. Furthermore, a characterization of intense Reynolds-stress events in square duct flow, together with a comparison of their shape for analogous events in channel flow at the same Reynolds number, is presented

Contribution of Reynolds-stress structures to the secondary flow in turbulent ducts

The present work is aimed at evaluating the contribution to the secondary flow in duct flow with square and rectangular cross section from three-dimensional coherent structures, defined as intense Reynolds-stress events. The contribution to a certain mean quantity is defined as the ensemble average over the detected coherent structures, weighted with their own occupied volume fraction. Our analysis unveils that the contribution to the cross-stream components of the mean velocity is either very similar to the same contribution in channel flow, or almost negligible in respect to the contribution from the portion of the domain not occupied by coherent structures. These results suggest that the most intense events are not directly responsible for the secondary flow