**Pavan V. Kashyap 1,\*, Yohann Duguet <sup>1</sup> and Olivier Dauchot <sup>2</sup>**


Received: 16 August 2020; Accepted: 4 September 2020; Published: 8 September 2020

**Abstract:** The transitional regime of plane channel flow is investigated above the transitional point below which turbulence is not sustained, using direct numerical simulation in large domains. Statistics of laminar-turbulent spatio-temporal intermittency are reported. The geometry of the pattern is first characterized, including statistics for the angles of the laminar-turbulent stripes observed in this regime, with a comparison to experiments. High-order statistics of the local and instantaneous bulk velocity, wall shear stress and turbulent kinetic energy are then provided. The distributions of the two former quantities have non-trivial shapes, characterized by a large kurtosis and/or skewness. Interestingly, we observe a strong linear correlation between their kurtosis and their skewness squared, which is usually reported at much higher Reynolds number in the fully turbulent regime.

**Keywords:** transition to turbulence; spatio-temporal intermittency; channel flow
