No Arabic abstract
We present a search for conformal invariance in vorticity isolines of two-dimensional compressible turbulence. The vorticity is measured by tracking the motion of particles that float at the surface of a turbulent tank of water. The three-dimensional turbulence in the tank has a Taylor microscale $Re_lambda simeq 160$. The conformal invariance theory being tested here is related to the behavior of equilibrium systems near a critical point. This theory is associated with the work of Lowner, Schramm and others and is usually referred to as Schramm-Lowner Evolution (SLE). The system was exposed to several tests of SLE. The results of these tests suggest that zero-vorticity isolines exhibit noticeable departures from this type of conformal invariance.
We present a numerical study of two-dimensional turbulent flows in the enstrophy cascade regime, with different large-scale forcings and energy sinks. In particular, we study the statistics of more-than-differentiable velocity fluctuations by means of two recently introduced sets of statistical estimators, namely {it inverse statistics} and {it second order differences}. We show that the 2D turbulent velocity field, $bm u$, cannot be simply characterized by its spectrum behavior, $E(k) propto k^{-alpha}$. There exists a whole set of exponents associated to the non-trivial smooth fluctuations of the velocity field at all scales. We also present a numerical investigation of the temporal properties of $bm u$ measured in different spatial locations.
The relative dispersion process in two-dimensional free convection turbulence is investigated by direct numerical simulation. In the inertial range, the growth of relative separation, $r$, is expected as $<r^2(t)>propto t^5$ according to the Bolgiano-Obukhov scaling. The result supporting the scaling is obtained with exit-time statistics. Detailed investigation of exit-time PDF shows that the PDF is divided into two regions, the Region-I and -II, reflecting two types of separating processes: persistent expansion and random transitions between expansion and compression of relative separation. This is consistent with the physical picture of the self-similar telegraph model. In addition, a method for estimating the parameters of the model are presented. Comparing two turbulence cases, two-dimensional free convection and inverse cascade turbulence, the relation between the drift term of the model and nature of coherent structures is discussed.
Under suitable forcing a fluid exhibits turbulence, with characteristics strongly affected by the fluids confining geometry. Here we study two-dimensional quantum turbulence in a highly oblate Bose-Einstein condensate in an annular trap. As a compressible quantum fluid, this system affords a rich phenomenology, allowing coupling between vortex and acoustic energy. Small-scale stirring generates an experimentally observed disordered vortex distribution that evolves into large-scale flow in the form of a persistent current. Numerical simulation of the experiment reveals additional characteristics of two-dimensional quantum turbulence: spontaneous clustering of same-circulation vortices, and an incompressible energy spectrum with $k^{-5/3}$ dependence for low wavenumbers $k$ and $k^{-3}$ dependence for high $k$.
The problem of inverse statistics (statistics of distances for which the signal fluctuations are larger than a certain threshold) in differentiable signals with power law spectrum, $E(k) sim k^{-alpha}$, $3 le alpha < 5$, is discussed. We show that for these signals, with random phases, exit-distance moments follow a bi-fractal distribution. We also investigate two dimensional turbulent flows in the direct cascade regime, which display a more complex behavior. We give numerical evidences that the inverse statistics of 2d turbulent flows is described by a multi-fractal probability distribution, i.e. the statistics of laminar events is not simply captured by the exponent $alpha$ characterizing the spectrum.
We have studied forced turbulence of compressible magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) flows through two-dimensional simulations with different numerical resolutions. First, hydrodynamic turbulence with Mach number $<M_s >_{rm init} equiv < v >_{rm rms}/ c_s = 1$ and density compression ${< deltarho / rho >}_{rm rms} simeq 0.45$ was generated by enforcing a random force. Then, initial, uniform magnetic fields of various strengths were added with Alfvenic Mach number $<M_A >_{rm init} equiv < v >_{rm rms} / c_{A, {rm init}} gg 1$. An isothermal equation of state was employed, and no explicit dissipation was included. After the MHD turbulence is saturated, the resulting flows are categorized as very weak field (VWF), weak field (WF), and strong field (SF) classes, which have $<M_A > equiv < v >_{rm rms} / < c_A >_{rm rms} gg 1$, $<M_A > > 1$, and $<M_A > sim 1$, respectively. Not only in the SF regime but also in the WF regime, turbulent transport is suppressed by the magnetic field. In the SF cases, the energy power spectra in the inertial range, although no longer power-law, exhibit a range with slopes close to $sim1.5$, hinting the Iroshnikov-Kraichnan spectrum. Our simulations were able to produce the SF class behaviors only with high resolution of at least $1024^2$ grid cells. The specific requirements for the simulation of the SF class should depend on the code (and the numerical scheme) as well as the initial setup, but our results do indicate that very high resolution would be required for converged results in simulation studies of MHD turbulence.