No Arabic abstract
We consider the turbulent energy dissipation from one-dimensional records in experiments using air and gaseous helium at cryogenic temperatures, and obtain the intermittency exponent via the two-point correlation function of the energy dissipation. The air data are obtained in a number of flows in a wind tunnel and the atmospheric boundary layer at a height of about 35 m above the ground. The helium data correspond to the centerline of a jet exhausting into a container. The air data on the intermittency exponent are consistent with each other and with a trend that increases with the Taylor microscale Reynolds number, R_lambda, of up to about 1000 and saturates thereafter. On the other hand, the helium data cluster around a constant value at nearly all R_lambda, this being about half of the asymptotic value for the air data. Some possible explanation is offered for this anomaly.
We adress the problem of interactions between the longitudinal velocity increment and the energy dissipation rate in fully developed turbulence. The coupling between these two quantities is experimentally investigated by the theory of stochastic Markovian processes. The so-called Markov analysis allows for a precise characterization of the joint statistical properties of velocity increment and energy dissipation. In particular, it is possible to determine the differential equation that governs the evolution along scales of the joint probability density of these two quantities. The properties of this equation provide interesting new insights into the coupling between energy dissipation and velocity incrementas leading to small scale intermittency.
In three dimensional turbulence there is on average a cascade of kinetic energy from the largest to the smallest scales of the flow. While the dominant idea is that the cascade occurs through the physical process of vortex stretching, evidence for this is debated. In the framework of the Karman-Howarth equation for the two point turbulent kinetic energy, we derive a new result for the average flux of kinetic energy between two points in the flow that reveals the role of vortex stretching. However, the result shows that vortex stretching is in fact not the main contributor to the average energy cascade; the main contributor is the self-amplification of the strain-rate field. We emphasize the need to correctly distinguish and not conflate the roles of vortex stretching and strain-self amplification in order to correctly understand the physics of the cascade, and also resolve a paradox regarding the differing role of vortex stretching on the mechanisms of the energy cascade and energy dissipation rate. Direct numerical simulations are used to confirm the results, as well as provide further results and insights on vortex stretching and strain-self amplification at different scales in the flow. Interestingly, the results imply that while vortex stretching plays a sub-leading role in the average cascade, it may play a leading order role during large fluctuations of the energy cascade about its average behavior.
The physical processes leading to anomalous fluctuations in turbulent flows, referred to as intermittency, are still challenging. Here, we use an approach based on instanton theory for the velocity increment dynamics through scales. Cascade trajectories with negative stochastic thermodynamics entropy exchange values lead to anomalous increments at small-scales. These trajectories concentrate around an instanton, which is the minimum of an effective action produced by turbulent fluctuations. The connection between entropy from stochastic thermodynamics and the related instanton provides a new perspective on the cascade process and the intermittency phenomenon.
Data from Direct Numerical Simulations of disperse bubbly flows in a vertical channel are used to study the effect of the bubbles on the carrier-phase turbulence. A new method is developed, based on the barycentric map approach, that allows to quantify the anisotropy and componentiality of the flow at any scale. Using this the bubbles are found to significantly enhance flow anisotropy at all scales compared with the unladen case, and for some bubble cases, very strong anisotropy persists down to the smallest flow scales. The strongest anisotropy observed was for the cases involving small bubbles. Concerning the inter-scale energy transfer, our results indicate that for the bubble-laden cases, the energy transfer is from large to small scales, just as for the unladen case. However, there is evidence of an upscale transfer when considering the transfer of energy associated with particular components of the velocity field. Although the direction of the energy transfer is the same with and without the bubbles, the transfer is much stronger for the bubble-laden cases, suggesting that the bubbles play a strong role in enhancing the activity of the nonlinear term in the flow. The normalized forms of the fourth and sixth-order structure functions are also considered, and reveal that the introduction of bubbles into the flow strongly enhances intermittency in the dissipation range, but suppresses it at larger scales. This strong enhancement of the dissipation scale intermittency has significant implications for understanding how the bubbles might modify the mixing properties of turbulent flows.
Features of the turbulent cascade are investigated for various datasets from three different turbulent flows. The analysis is focused on the question as to whether developed turbulent flows show universal small scale features. To answer this question, 2-point statistics and joint multi-scale statistics of longitudinal velocity increments are analysed. Evidence of the Markov property for the turbulent cascade is shown, which corresponds to a 3-point closure that reduces the joint multi-scale statistics to simple conditional probability density functions (cPDF). The cPDF are described by the Fokker-Planck equation in scale and its Kramers-Moyal coefficients (KMCs). KMCs are obtained by a self-consistent optimisation procedure from the measured data and result in a Fokker-Planck equation for each dataset. The knowledge of these stochastic cascade equations enables to make use of the concepts of non-equilibrium thermodynamics and thus to determine the entropy production along individual cascade trajectories. In addition to this new concept, it is shown that the local entropy production is nearly perfectly balanced for all datasets by the integral fluctuation theorem (IFT). Thus the validity of the IFT can be taken as a new law of the turbulent cascade and at the same time independently confirms that the physics of the turbulent cascade is a memoryless Markov process in scale. IFT is taken as a new tool to prove the optimal functional form of the Fokker-Planck equations and subsequently to investigate the question of universality of small scale turbulence. The results of our analysis show that the turbulent cascade contains universal and non-universal features. We identify small scale intermittency as a universality breaking feature. We conclude that specific turbulent flows have their own particular multi-scale cascade, with other words their own stochastic fingerprint.