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

Man, Meaning and History

Indonesi

Universal dissipation scaling for non-equilibrium turbulence

It is experimentally shown that the non-classical high Reynolds number energy dissipation behaviour, $C_{\epsilon} \equiv \epsilon L/u^3 = f(Re_M)/Re_L$, 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 $Re_M$, $f(Re_M)\sim Re_M$.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