Master-modes in 3D turbulent channel flow

Turbulent flow fields can be expanded into a series in a set of basic functions. The terms of such series are often called modes. A master- (or determining) mode set is a subset of these modes, the time history of which uniquely determines the time history of the entire turbulent flow provided that this flow is developed. In the present work the existence of the master-mode-set is demonstrated numerically for turbulent channel flow. The minimal size of a master-mode set and the rate of the process of the recovery of the entire flow from the master-mode set history are estimated. The velocity field corresponding to the minimal master-mode set is found to be a good approximation for mean velocity in the entire flow field. Mean characteristics involving velocity derivatives deviate in a very close vicinity to the wall, while master-mode two-point correlations exhibit unrealistic oscillations. This can be improved by using a larger than minimal master-mode set. The near-wall streaks are found to be contained in the velocity field corresponding to the minimal master-mode set, and the same is true at least for the large-scale part of the longitudinal vorticity structure. A database containing the time history of a master-mode set is demonstrated to be an efficient tool for investigating rare events in turbulent flows. In particular, a travelling-wave-like object was identified on the basis of the analysis of the database. Two master-mode-set databases of the time history of a turbulent channel flow are made available online at http://www.dnsdata.afm.ses.soton.ac.uk/. The services provided include the facility for the code uploaded by a user to be run on the server with an access to the data

Computation of the magnetostatic interaction between linearly magnetized polyhedrons

In this paper we present a method to accurately compute the energy of the magnetostatic interaction between linearly (or uniformly, as a special case) magnetized polyhedrons. The method has applications in finite element micromagnetics, or more generally in computing the magnetostatic interaction when the magnetization is represented using the finite element method (FEM). The magnetostatic energy is described by a six-fold integral that is singular when the interaction regions overlap, making direct numerical evaluation problematic. To resolve the singularity, we evaluate four of the six iterated integrals analytically resulting in a 2d integral over the surface of a polyhedron, which is nonsingular and can be integrated numerically. This provides a more accurate and efficient way of computing the magnetostatic energy integral compared to existing approaches. The method was developed to facilitate the evaluation of the demagnetizing interaction between neighouring elements in finite-element micromagnetics and provides a possibility to compute the demagnetizing field using efficient fast multipole or tree code algorithms

Computing the demagnetizing tensor for finite difference micromagnetic simulations via numerical integration

In the finite difference method which is commonly used in computational micromagnetics, the demagnetizing field is usually computed as a convolution of the magnetization vector field with the demagnetizing tensor that describes the magnetostatic field of a cuboidal cell with constant magnetization. An analytical expression for the demagnetizing tensor is available, however at distances far from the cuboidal cell, the numerical evaluation of the analytical expression can be very inaccurate. Due to this large-distance inaccuracy numerical packages such as OOMMF compute the demagnetizing tensor using the explicit formula at distances close to the originating cell, but at distances far from the originating cell a formula based on an asymptotic expansion has to be used. In this work, we describe a method to calculate the demagnetizing field by numerical evaluation of the multidimensional integral in the demagnetization tensor terms using a sparse grid integration scheme. This method improves the accuracy of computation at intermediate distances from the origin. We compute and report the accuracy of (i) the numerical evaluation of the exact tensor expression which is best for short distances, (ii) the asymptotic expansion best suited for large distances, and (iii) the new method based on numerical integration, which is superior to methods (i) and (ii) for intermediate distances. For all three methods, we show the measurements of accuracy and execution time as a function of distance, for calculations using single precision (4-byte) and double precision (8-byte) floating point arithmetic. We make recommendations for the choice of scheme order and integrating coefficients for the numerical integration method (iii)

An adaptive octree finite element method for PDEs posed on surfaces

The paper develops a finite element method for partial differential equations posed on hypersurfaces in $\mathbb{R}^N$, $N=2,3$. The method uses traces of bulk finite element functions on a surface embedded in a volumetric domain. The bulk finite element space is defined on an octree grid which is locally refined or coarsened depending on error indicators and estimated values of the surface curvatures. The cartesian structure of the bulk mesh leads to easy and efficient adaptation process, while the trace finite element method makes fitting the mesh to the surface unnecessary. The number of degrees of freedom involved in computations is consistent with the two-dimension nature of surface PDEs. No parametrization of the surface is required; it can be given implicitly by a level set function. In practice, a variant of the marching cubes method is used to recover the surface with the second order accuracy. We prove the optimal order of accuracy for the trace finite element method in $H^1$ and $L^2$ surface norms for a problem with smooth solution and quasi-uniform mesh refinement. Experiments with less regular problems demonstrate optimal convergence with respect to the number of degrees of freedom, if grid adaptation is based on an appropriate error indicator. The paper shows results of numerical experiments for a variety of geometries and problems, including advection-diffusion equations on surfaces. Analysis and numerical results of the paper suggest that combination of cartesian adaptive meshes and the unfitted (trace) finite elements provide simple, efficient, and reliable tool for numerical treatment of PDEs posed on surfaces