794 research outputs found
Extreme Lagrangian acceleration in confined turbulent flow
A Lagrangian study of two-dimensional turbulence for two different
geometries, a periodic and a confined circular geometry, is presented to
investigate the influence of solid boundaries on the Lagrangian dynamics. It is
found that the Lagrangian acceleration is even more intermittent in the
confined domain than in the periodic domain. The flatness of the Lagrangian
acceleration as a function of the radius shows that the influence of the wall
on the Lagrangian dynamics becomes negligible in the center of the domain and
it also reveals that the wall is responsible for the increased intermittency.
The transition in the Lagrangian statistics between this region, not directly
influenced by the walls, and a critical radius which defines a Lagrangian
boundary layer, is shown to be very sharp with a sudden increase of the
acceleration flatness from about 5 to about 20
Excitation of stellar p-modes by turbulent convection: 1. Theoretical formulation
Stochatic excitation of stellar oscillations by turbulent convection is
investigated and an expression for the power injected into the oscillations by
the turbulent convection of the outer layers is derived which takes into
account excitation through turbulent Reynolds stresses and turbulent entropy
fluctuations. This formulation generalizes results from previous works and is
built so as to enable investigations of various possible spatial and temporal
spectra of stellar turbulent convection. For the Reynolds stress contribution
and assuming the Kolmogorov spectrum we obtain a similar formulation than those
derived by previous authors. The entropy contribution to excitation is found to
originate from the advection of the Eulerian entropy fluctuations by the
turbulent velocity field. Numerical computations in the solar case in a
companion paper indicate that the entropy source term is dominant over Reynold
stress contribution to mode excitation, except at high frequencies.Comment: 14 pages, accepted for publication in A&
Intermittency of velocity time increments in turbulence
We analyze the statistics of turbulent velocity fluctuations in the time
domain. Three cases are computed numerically and compared: (i) the time traces
of Lagrangian fluid particles in a (3D) turbulent flow (referred to as the
"dynamic" case); (ii) the time evolution of tracers advected by a frozen
turbulent field (the "static" case), and (iii) the evolution in time of the
velocity recorded at a fixed location in an evolving Eulerian velocity field,
as it would be measured by a local probe (referred to as the "virtual probe"
case). We observe that the static case and the virtual probe cases share many
properties with Eulerian velocity statistics. The dynamic (Lagrangian) case is
clearly different; it bears the signature of the global dynamics of the flow.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, to appear in PR
Melting dynamics of large ice balls in a turbulent swirling flow
We study the melting dynamics of large ice balls in a turbulent von Karman
flow at very high Reynolds number. Using an optical shadowgraphy setup, we
record the time evolution of particle sizes. We study the heat transfer as a
function of the particle scale Reynolds number for three cases: fixed ice balls
melting in a region of strong turbulence with zero mean flow, fixed ice balls
melting under the action of a strong mean flow with lower fluctuations, and ice
balls freely advected in the whole flow. For the fixed particles cases, heat
transfer is observed to be much stronger than in laminar flows, the Nusselt
number behaving as a power law of the Reynolds number of exponent 0.8. For
freely advected ice balls, the turbulent transfer is further enhanced and the
Nusselt number is proportional to the Reynolds number. The surface heat flux is
then independent of the particles size, leading to an ultimate regime of heat
transfer reached when the thermal boundary layer is fully turbulent
Universal dissipation scaling for non-equilibrium turbulence
It is experimentally shown that the non-classical high Reynolds number energy
dissipation behaviour, ,
observed during the decay of fractal square grid-generated turbulence is also
manifested in decaying turbulence originating from various regular grids. For
sufficiently high values of the global Reynolds numbers , .Comment: 5 pages, 6 figure
On the unsteady behavior of turbulence models
Periodically forced turbulence is used as a test case to evaluate the
predictions of two-equation and multiple-scale turbulence models in unsteady
flows. The limitations of the two-equation model are shown to originate in the
basic assumption of spectral equilibrium. A multiple-scale model based on a
picture of stepwise energy cascade overcomes some of these limitations, but the
absence of nonlocal interactions proves to lead to poor predictions of the time
variation of the dissipation rate. A new multiple-scale model that includes
nonlocal interactions is proposed and shown to reproduce the main features of
the frequency response correctly
Decay of scalar variance in isotropic turbulence in a bounded domain
The decay of scalar variance in isotropic turbulence in a bounded domain is
investigated. Extending the study of Touil, Bertoglio and Shao (2002; Journal
of Turbulence, 03, 49) to the case of a passive scalar, the effect of the
finite size of the domain on the lengthscales of turbulent eddies and scalar
structures is studied by truncating the infrared range of the wavenumber
spectra. Analytical arguments based on a simple model for the spectral
distributions show that the decay exponent for the variance of scalar
fluctuations is proportional to the ratio of the Kolmogorov constant to the
Corrsin-Obukhov constant. This result is verified by closure calculations in
which the Corrsin-Obukhov constant is artificially varied. Large-eddy
simulations provide support to the results and give an estimation of the value
of the decay exponent and of the scalar to velocity time scale ratio
Inertial range scaling of the scalar flux spectrum in two-dimensional turbulence
Two-dimensional statistically stationary isotropic turbulence with an imposed
uniform scalar gradient is investigated. Dimensional arguments are presented to
predict the inertial range scaling of the turbulent scalar flux spectrum in
both the inverse cascade range and the enstrophy cascade range for small and
unity Schmidt numbers. The scaling predictions are checked by direct numerical
simulations and good agreement is observed
Matrix exponential-based closures for the turbulent subgrid-scale stress tensor
Two approaches for closing the turbulence subgrid-scale stress tensor in terms of matrix exponentials are introduced and compared. The first approach is based on a formal solution of the stress transport equation in which the production terms can be integrated exactly in terms of matrix exponentials. This formal solution of the subgrid-scale stress transport equation is shown to be useful to explore special cases, such as the response to constant velocity gradient, but neglecting pressure-strain correlations and diffusion effects. The second approach is based on an Eulerian-Lagrangian change of variables, combined with the assumption of isotropy for the conditionally averaged Lagrangian velocity gradient tensor and with the recent fluid deformation approximation. It is shown that both approaches lead to the same basic closure in which the stress tensor is expressed as the matrix exponential of the resolved velocity gradient tensor multiplied by its transpose. Short-time expansions of the matrix exponentials are shown to provide an eddy-viscosity term and particular quadratic terms, and thus allow a reinterpretation of traditional eddy-viscosity and nonlinear stress closures. The basic feasibility of the matrix-exponential closure is illustrated by implementing it successfully in large eddy simulation of forced isotropic turbulence. The matrix-exponential closure employs the drastic approximation of entirely omitting the pressure-strain correlation and other nonlinear scrambling terms. But unlike eddy-viscosity closures, the matrix exponential approach provides a simple and local closure that can be derived directly from the stress transport equation with the production term, and using physically motivated assumptions about Lagrangian decorrelation and upstream isotropy
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