A turbulent circular disk wake database (Chongsiripinyo & Sarkar, J. Fluid Mech., vol. 885, 2020) at Reynolds number
$Re = U_\infty D/\nu = 5 \times 10^{4}$
is interrogated to identify the presence of large-scale streaks – coherent elongated regions of streamwise velocity. The unprecedented streamwise length – until
$x/D \approx 120$
– of the simulation enables investigation of the near and far wakes. The near wake is dominated by the vortex shedding (VS) mode residing at azimuthal wavenumber
$m=1$
and Strouhal number
$St = 0.135$
. After filtering out the VS structure, conclusive evidence of large-scale streaks with frequency
$St \rightarrow 0$
, equivalently streamwise wavenumber
$k_x \rightarrow 0$
in the wake, becomes apparent in visualizations and spectra. These streaky structures are found throughout the simulation domain beyond
$x/D \approx 10$
. Conditionally averaged streamwise vorticity fields reveal that the lift-up mechanism is active in the near as well as the far wake, and that ejections contribute more than sweeps to events of intense
$-u'_xu'_r$
. Spectral proper orthogonal decomposition is employed to extract the energy and the spatiotemporal features of the large-scale streaks. The streak energy is concentrated in the
$m=2$
azimuthal mode over the entire domain. Finally, bispectral mode decomposition is conducted to reveal strong interaction between
$m=1$
and
$St = \pm 0.135$
modes to give the
$m=2$
,
$St \rightarrow 0$
streak mode. Our results indicate that the self-interaction of the VS mode generates the
$m=2$
,
$St \rightarrow 0$
streamwise vortices, which leads to streak formation through the lift-up process. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that reports and characterizes large-scale low-frequency streaks and the associated lift-up mechanism in a turbulent wake.