Recovering Isotropic Statistics in Turbulence Simulations: The Kolmogorov 4/5th-Law

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Abstract
One of the main benchmarks in direct numerical simulations of three-dimensional turbulence is the Kolmogorov 1941 prediction for third-order structure functions with homogeneous and isotropic statistics in the infinite-Reynolds number limit. Previous DNS techniques to obtain isotropic statistics have relied on time-averaging structure functions in a few directions over many eddy turnover times, using forcing schemes carefully constructed to generate isotropic data. Motivated by recent theoretical work which removes isotropy requirements by spherically averaging structure functions over all directions, we will present results which supplement long-time averaging by angle-averaging over up to 73 directions from a single flow snapshot. The directions are among those natural to a square computational grid, and are weighted to approximate the spherical average. The averaging process is cheap, and for the Kolmogorov 1941 4/5ths law, reasonable results can be obtained from a single snapshot of data. This procedure may be used to investigate the isotropic statistics of any quantity of interest.

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