Turbulence textbook recommendations?
 

Hey,

I'm looking for a simple reading on turbulence and I'm debating between Pope's or Mathieu & Scott's. I'm getting some mixed and assorted reviews online. From your experiences, what do you guys prefer?

If money is no big issue than I would definitely recommend you "Turbulence Modeling for CFD" by David C. Wilcox (creator of the k-omega model).

I used that book for an undergraduate project. I don't know how I got caught on turbulence modeling where I had no experience whatsoever but that book real helped and it is a "written" book with words rather than a compilation of "mathematical formulas" (of course you have loads of formulas but hey, we are talking about turbulence here).

It's definitely worth trying

For turbulence modeling I agree that Wilcox's book is good. It is getting a bit old by now, but not much exiting has happened in turbulence modeling over the last 10 years so it still works in my opinion.

For general turbulence theory I am not sure what book is the best today. We have a fairly comprehensive introduction to turbulence in CFD-Wiki here at CFD Online:

http://www.cfd-online.com/Wiki/Turbulence

This text is based on a book called "Lectures in Turbulence for the 21st Century" written by Professor William K. George. It was used in a first course on turbulence at Chalmers University of Technology.

I personally like Pope's book on turbulent flows, but its a bit dense sometimes but interesting to do the problems. If you want a really good book with a phenomenological approach to turbulence, "A First Course in Turbulence" by Tennekes and Lumley is a good one that I know several graduate programs use as an introductory text. If you want to go deeper into the subject of homogeneous turbulence, Batchelor has a book "The Theory of Homogeneous Turbulence " but it may be a bit outdated. From a modeling perspective, WIlcox is a good one (as previously suggested). Those are my favorite. Enjoy.

+1 for Pope