A Theory of Hydrodynamic Turbulence Based on Non-equilibrium Statistical Mechanics

In earlier papers, we have studied the turbulent flow exponents \(\zeta _p\), where \(\langle |\Delta \mathbf{v}|^p\rangle \sim \ell ^{\zeta _p}\) and \(\Delta \mathbf{v}\) is the contribution to the fluid velocity at small scale \(\ell \). Using ideas of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics we have found

$$\begin{aligned} \zeta _p={p\over 3}-{1\over \ln \kappa }\ln \Gamma \left( {p\over 3}+1\right) \end{aligned}$$

where \(1/\ln \kappa \) is experimentally \(\approx \,0.32\,\pm \,0.01\). The purpose of the present note is to propose a somewhat more physical derivation of the formula for \(\zeta _p\). We also present an estimate \(\approx \,100\) for the Reynolds number at the onset of turbulence.