Over the years, many facilities have been developed to study turbulent flow in the laboratory. Homogeneous isotropic turbulence (HIT) with zero mean flow provides a unique environment for investigating fundamental aspects and specific applications of turbulent flow. We provide an extensive overview of laboratory facilities that generate incompressible zero-mean-flow HIT using different types of actuators and configurations. Reviewed facilities cover a variety of geometries and sizes, as well as forcing style (e.g. symmetric versus asymmetric and unsteady versus steady). We divide facilities into four categories, highlighting links between their geometries and the statistics of the flows they generate. We then compare published data to uncover similarities and differences among various turbulence-generation mechanisms. We also compare the decay of turbulence in zero-mean-flow facilities with that observed in wind and water tunnels, and we analyse the connections between flow characteristics and physical aspects of the facilities. Our results emphasize the importance of considering facility geometry and size together with the strength and type of actuators when studying zero-mean-flow HIT. Overall, we provide insight into how to optimally design and build laboratory facilities that generate zero-mean-flow HIT.

Homogeneous isotropic turbulence has been playing a key role in the research of turbulence theory. And the pseudo-spectral method is the most popular numerical method to simulate this type of flow fields in a periodic box, where fast Fourier transform (FFT) is mostly effective. However, the bottle-neck in this method is the memory of computer, which motivates us to construct a memory-saving algorithm for spectral method in present paper. Inevitably, more times of FFT are needed as compensation. In the most memory-saving situation, only 6 three-dimension arrays are employed in the code. The cost of computation is increased by a factor of 4, and that 38 FFTs are needed per time step instead of the previous 9 FFTs. A simulation of isotropic turbulence on 20483 grid can be implemented on a 256G distributed memory clusters through this method.