Non-locality and Intermittency in 3D Turbulence

Numerical simulations are used to determine the influence of the non-local and local interactions on the intermittency corrections in the scaling properties of 3D turbulence. We show that neglect of local interactions leads to an enhanced small-scale energy spectrum and to a significantly larger number of very intense vortices (tornadoes) and stronger intermittency. On the other hand, neglect of the non-local interactions results in even stronger small-scale spectrum but significantly weaker intermittency. Based on these observations, a new model of turbulence is proposed, in which non-local (RDT-like) interactions couple large and small scale via a multiplicative process with additive noise and the local interactions are modeled by a turbulent viscosity. This model is used to derive a simple toy version of the Langevin equations for small-scale velocity increments. A Gaussian approximation for the large scale fields yields the Fokker-Planck equation for the probability distribution function of the velocity increments. Steady state solutions of this equation allows to qualitatively explain the anomalous corrections and the skewness generation along scale.Comment: 40 pages, 29 figure

A weak turbulence theory for incompressible magnetohydrodynamics

We derive a weak turbulence formalism for incompressible magnetohydrodynamics. Three-wave interactions lead to a system of kinetic equations for the spectral densities of energy and helicity. The kinetic equations conserve energy in all wavevector planes normal to the applied magnetic field B0ê[parallel R: parallel]. Numerically and analytically, we find energy spectra E± [similar] kn±[bot bottom], such that n+ + n− = −4, where E± are the spectra of the Elsässer variables z± = v ± b in the two-dimensional case (k[parallel R: parallel] = 0). The constants of the spectra are computed exactly and found to depend on the amount of correlation between the velocity and the magnetic field. Comparison with several numerical simulations and models is also made