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Recent findings on the Reynolds-number-dependent behaviour of near-wall turbulence in terms of the ‘foot-printing’ of outer large-scale structures call for a new modelling development. A two-scale framework was proposed to couple a local fine-mesh solution with a global coarse-mesh solution by He (Intl J. Numer. Meth. Fluids, vol. 86, 2018, pp. 655–677). The methodology was implemented and demonstrated by Chen & He (J. Fluid Mech, vol. 933, 2022, p. A47) for a canonical turbulent channel flow, where the mesh-count scaling with Reynolds number is potentially reduced from 
$O(R{e^2})$ for a conventional wall-resolved large-eddy simulation (WRLES) to 
$O(R{e^1})$. The present work extends the two-scale method to turbulent boundary layers. A two-dimensional roughness element is used to trip a turbulent boundary layer. It is observed that large-scale disturbances originating at the trip have a much shorter lifetime and weaker foot-printing signatures on near-wall flow compared to those long streaky coherent structures in well-developed wall-bounded turbulent flows. Modal analyses show that the impact of trip-induced large scales can be adequately captured by a locally embedded fine-mesh block. For the tripped turbulent boundary layer, a Chebyshev block-spectral mapping is adopted to propagate source terms from the local fine-mesh blocks to the global coarse-mesh domain, driving to a target solution for the upscaled equations. The computed mean statistics and energy spectra are in good agreement with corresponding experimental data, WRLES and direct numerical simulation (DNS) results. The overall mesh count–
$Re$ scaling is estimated to reduce from 
$O(R{e^{1.8}})$ for the full wall-resolved LES to 
$O(R{e^{0.9}})$ for the present two-scale solution.
Recent findings on wall-bounded turbulence have prompted a new impetus for modelling development to capture and resolve the Reynolds-number-dependent influence of outer flow on near-wall turbulence in terms of the ‘foot-printing’ of the large-scale coherent structures and the scale-interaction associated ‘modulation’. We develop a two-scale method to couple a locally embedded near-wall fine-mesh direct numerical simulation (DNS) block with a global coarser mesh domain. The influence of the large-scale structures on the local fine-mesh block is captured by a scale-dependent coarse–fine domain interface treatment. The coarse-mesh resolved disturbances are directly exchanged across the interface, while only the fine-mesh resolved fluctuations around the coarse-mesh resolved variables are subject to periodic conditions in the streamwise and spanwise directions. The global near-wall coarse-mesh region outside the local fine-mesh block is governed by the augmented flow governing equations with forcing source terms generated by upscaling the space–time-averaged fine-mesh solution. The validity and effectiveness of the method are examined for canonical incompressible channel flows at several Reynolds numbers. The mean statistics and energy spectra are in good agreement with the corresponding full DNS data. The results clearly illustrate the ‘foot-printing’ and ‘modulation’ in the local fine-mesh block. Noteworthy also is that neither spectral-gap nor scale-separation is assumed, and a smooth overlap between the global-domain and the local-domain energy spectra is observed. It is shown that the mesh-count scaling with Reynolds number is potentially reduced from 
$O(R{e^2})$ for the conventional fully wall-resolved large-eddy simulation (LES) to 
$O(Re)$ for the present locally embedded two-scale LES.
