Turbulence of a windtunnel flow is stirred using objects that have a fractal structure. The strong turbulent wakes resulting from three such objects which have different fractal dimensions are probed using multiprobe hot-wire anemometry in various configurations. Statistical turbulent quantities are studied within inertial and dissipative range scales in an attempt to relate changes in their self-similar behavior to the scaling of the fractal objects.

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We study strongly turbulent windtunnel flows with controlled anisotropy. Using a recent formalism based on angular momentum and the irreducible representations of the SO͑3͒ rotation group, we attempt to extract this anisotropy from the angular dependence of second-order structure functions. Our instrumentation allows a measurement of both the separation and the angle dependence of the structure function. In axisymmetric turbulence which has a weak anisotropy, this more extended information produces ambiguous results. In more strongly anisotropic shear turbulence, the SO͑3͒ description enables one to find the anisotropy scaling exponent. The key quality of the SO͑3͒ description is that structure functions are a mixture of algebraic functions of the scale with exponents ordered such that the contribution of anisotropies diminishes at small scales. However, we find that in third-order structure functions of homogeneous shear turbulence the anisotropic contribution is always large and of the same order of magnitude as the isotropic part. Our results concern the minimum instrumentation needed to determine the parameters of the SO͑3͒ description, and raise several questions about its ability to describe the angle dependence of high-order structure functions.

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