Structure Functions in Complex Flows

The turbulence in the ocean and atmosphere is most of the time non-homogeneous in nature. These spatial changes could affect the structure of the turbulence. In this work a classification is proposed to determine the intermittency and mixing ability. The variation of the structure functions and the scaling exponent in decaying non-homogeneous turbulence produced by a grid and by a jet is measured with a sonic velocimeter SONTEK3-D. We use Extended Self Similarity (ESS) to obtain better estimates of the scaling exponents of the structure functions of order up to the 6th. We study the variation of the absolute scaling exponents _p and relative scaling exponents ¯_p as a function of distance from the source of turbulence. In most cases, the absolute scaling exponent ₃ is shown to vary as function of the separation distance l. On the other hand the relative scaling exponents ¯_p depend on the location of the flow and in most cases the deviations from the Kolmogorov 1941 scaling are related to the intermittency.