Turbulent Shearless Mixings

Details

Last Updated on Wednesday, 28 January 2015 13:45

Turbulent shearless mixings in the presence of or without a gradient of integral scale

Note: Page under construction after database corruption ...

- The turbulent diffusion is increased if the kinetic energy gradient is concurrent with the integral scale gradient, and vice versa (JFM 2006, v.549).

- The interaction of two isotropic turbulent fields of equal integral scale but different kinetic energy generates the simplest kind of inhomogeneous turbulent field. Our experiment shows that the presence of a turbulent energy gradient is sufficient for the appearance of intermittency and that during the mixing process the pressure transport is not negligible with respect to the turbulent velocity transport. These findings may open the way to the hypothesis that the presence of a gradient of turbulent energy is the minimal requirement for Gaussian departure in turbulence (Advances in Turbulence XI, pp. 697-699, and PRE 2008 http://arxiv.org/abs/0705.4071).

Figure 1. Scheme of the flow configuration. (a) Initial distribution of the turbulent energy and passive scalar. (b) total and fluctuating density distributions in the periodic box at the initial time in presence of a constant density gradient. (c-f) turbulent energy self-diffusion in 3D [Phys.Rev.E 77 (2008), Physica D 241 (2011)] and 2D, (d-g) preliminary results on 3D and 2D passive scalar transport. (e-g) vorticity self diffusion in presence of a stable density stratification in both 3D (e) and 2D (g) formulations. The vertical dashed lines indicate the position of the intermittency front, the dotted lines indicate the centre of the mixing layer.

A gallery of turbulent mixing visualization can be seen here.