Small-scale properties of scalar and velocity differences in three-dimensional turbulence

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Turbulent flows are known to concentrate strong vorticity in vortex tubes, giving rise to large velocity jumps across the tubes. When a passive scalar is advected by the flow, very steep scalar fronts separate well-mixed regions, and result in large scalar differences. The properties of these large jumps are investigated by studying the probability distribution functions of velocity, scalar differences as a function of the separation between the points, of the Reynolds and of the Prandtl number. Over the range of parameters covered by the direct numerical simulations reported here (20≤Rλ≤90 and 1/32≤Pr≤1), it is found that the widths of the velocity (respectively, the scalar) jumps scale like the Kolmogorov length (respectively, like the Batchelor length). For both the scalar and the velocity, the large differences over small distance become rarer as the Reynolds number increases.