Lagrangian dispersion and heat transport in convective turbulence

Lagrangian studies of the local temperature mixing and heat transport in turbulent Rayleigh-Bénard convection are presented, based on three-dimensional direct numerical simulations. Contrary to vertical pair distances, the temporal growth of lateral pair distances agrees with the Richardson law, but yields a smaller Richardson constant due to correlated pair motion in plumes. Our results thus imply that Richardson dispersion is also found in anisotropic turbulence. We find that extremely large vertical accelerations appear less frequently than lateral ones and are not connected with rising or falling thermal plumes. The height-dependent joint Lagrangian statistics of vertical acceleration and local heat transfer allow us to identify a zone which is dominated by thermal plume mixing.     

Shear effects in nonhomogeneous turbulence

Motivated by recent experimental and numerical results, a simple unifying picture of intermittency in turbulent shear flows is suggested. Integral structure functions (ISF), taking into account explicitly the shear intensity, are introduced on phenomenological grounds. ISF can exhibit a universal scaling behavior, independent of the shear intensity. This picture is in satisfactory agreement with both experimental and numerical data. Possible extension to convective turbulence and implication on closure conditions for large-eddy simulation of nonhomogeneous flows are briefly discussed.     

Characterization of nondiffusive transport in plasma turbulence via a novel Lagrangian method

A novel method to probe and characterize the nature of the transport of passive scalars carried out by a turbulent flow is introduced. It requires the determination of two exponents which encapsulate the statistical and correlation properties of the component of interest of the Lagrangian velocities of the flow. Numerical simulations of a magnetically confined, near-critical turbulent plasma, known to exhibit superdiffusive radial transport, are used to illustrate the method. It is shown that the method can easily detect the change in the dynamics of the radial transport that takes place after adding to the simulations a (subdominant) diffusive channel of tunable strength.     

Lagrangian structure functions in hydrodynamic turbulence

Based on a solution of the Navier-Stokes equations for the inertial range of fully developed turbulence, a statistical theory is developed to determine the Lagrangian structure functions K _n (τ). Over times τ shorter than the large-scale correlation time τ_c, they obey scaling relations of the form K _n (τ) ∞ \(\tau ^{\zeta _n } \). Analytical expressions are derived for ζ _n . A detailed comparison between the theory and the experimental results presented in [1] demonstrates complete quantitative agreement. A new concept is introduced in turbulence theory: the correlation R _n (τ) between tracer-particle positions on a Lagrangian trajectory. It is shown that the position correlation functions R _n exhibit universal scaling behavior for n > 3.     

Multifractal dimension of Lagrangian turbulence

We report experimental measurements of the Lagrangian multifractal dimension spectrum in an intensely turbulent laboratory water flow by the optical tracking of tracer particles. The Legendre transform of the measured spectrum is compared with measurements of the scaling exponents of the Lagrangian velocity structure functions, and excellent agreement between the two measurements is found, in support of the multifractal picture of turbulence. These measurements are compared with three model dimension spectra. When the nonexistence of structure functions of order less than -1 is accounted for, the models are shown to agree well with the measured spectrum.     

Lagrangian dynamics of drift-wave turbulence

The statistical properties of Lagrangian particle transport are investigated in dissipative drift-wave turbulence modelled by the Hasegawa-Wakatani system. By varying the adiabaticity parameter c, the flow regime can be modified from a hydrodynamic limit for c=0 to a geostrophic limit for c→∞. For c of order unity the quasi-adiabatic regime is obtained, which might be relevant to describe the edge turbulence of fusion plasmas in tokamaks. This particularity of the model allows one to study the change in dynamics when varying from one turbulent flow regime to another. By means of direct numerical simulation we consider four values for c and show that the Lagrangian dynamics is most intermittent in the hydrodynamic regime, while the other regimes are not or only weakly intermittent. In both quasi-adiabatic and quasi-geostrophic regimes the PDFs of acceleration exhibit exponential tails. This behaviour is due to the pressure term in the acceleration and not a signature of intermittency.     

High order Lagrangian velocity statistics in turbulence

We report measurements of the Lagrangian velocity structure functions of orders 1 through 10 in a high Reynolds number (Taylor microscale Reynolds numbers of up to R(lambda) = 815 ) turbulence experiment. Passive tracer particles are tracked optically in three dimensions and in time, and velocities are calculated from the particle tracks. The structure function anomalous scaling exponents are measured both directly and using extended self-similarity and are found to be more intermittent than their Eulerian counterparts. Classical Kolmogorov inertial range scaling is also found for all structure function orders at times that trend downward as the order increases. The temporal shift of this classical scaling behavior is observed to saturate as the structure function order increases at times shorter than the Kolmogorov time scale.     

Lagrangian turbulence in nonstationary 2-D flows

Lagrangian particle transport in nonstationary 2-D flows is studied both analytically and numerically. Analytic expressions for the diffusion coefficients are obtained for the adiabatic regime. Numerical estimates of the diffusion coefficients are found to agree with the theoretical results.     

Uncovering the Lagrangian skeleton of turbulence

We present a technique that uncovers the Lagrangian building blocks of turbulence, and apply this technique to a quasi-two-dimensional turbulent flow experiment. Our analysis identifies an intricate network of attracting and repelling material lines. This chaotic tangle, the Lagrangian skeleton of turbulence, shows a level of complexity found previously only in theoretical and numerical examples of strange attractors. We quantify the strength (hyperbolicity) of each material line in the skeleton and demonstrate dramatically different mixing properties in different parts of the tangle.     

Lagrangian Markovianized field approximation for turbulence

In a previous communication (W.J.T. Bos and J.-P. Bertoglio 2006, Phys. Fluids, 18, 031706), a self-consistent Markovian triadic closure was presented. The detailed derivation of this closure is given here, relating it to the Direct Interaction Approximation and Quasi-Normal types of closure. The time-scale needed to obtain a self-consistent closure for both the energy spectrum and the scalar variance spectrum is determined by evaluating the correlation between the velocity and an advected displacement vector-field. The relation between this latter correlation and the velocity–scalar correlation is stressed, suggesting a simplified model of the latter. The resulting closed equations are numerically integrated and results for the energy spectrum, scalar fluctuation spectrum and velocity–displacement correlation spectrum are presented for low, unity and high values of the Schmidt number.     

Multifractal statistics of Lagrangian velocity and acceleration in turbulence

The statistical properties of velocity and acceleration fields along the trajectories of fluid particles transported by a fully developed turbulent flow are investigated by means of high resolution direct numerical simulations. We present results for Lagrangian velocity structure functions, the acceleration probability density function, and the acceleration variance conditioned on the instantaneous velocity. These are compared with predictions of the multifractal formalism, and its merits and limitations are discussed.     

Lagrangian dynamics and statistical geometric structure of turbulence

The local statistical and geometric structure of three-dimensional turbulent flow can be described by the properties of the velocity gradient tensor. A stochastic model is developed for the Lagrangian time evolution of this tensor, in which the exact nonlinear self-stretching term accounts for the development of well-known non-Gaussian statistics and geometric alignment trends. The nonlocal pressure and viscous effects are accounted for by a closure that models the material deformation history of fluid elements. The resulting stochastic system reproduces many statistical and geometric trends observed in numerical and experimental 3D turbulent flows, including anomalous relative scaling.     

Density-PDFs and Lagrangian statistics of highly compressible turbulence

In isothermal, highly compressible turbulent flows, density fluctuations follow a log-normal distribution. We establish a connection between these density fluctuations and the probability-density-functions (PDF) of Lagrangian tracer particles advected with the flow. Our predicted particle statistics is tested against large scale numerical simulations, which were performed with 512³ collocation points and 2 million tracer particles integrated over several dynamical times.     

Lagrangian statistical theory of fully developed hydrodynamical turbulence

The Lagrangian velocity structure functions in the inertial range of fully developed fluid turbulence are for the first time derived based on the Navier-Stokes equation. For time tau much smaller than the correlation time, the structure functions are shown to obey the scaling relations K_{n}(tau) proportional, varianttau;{zeta_{n}}. The scaling exponents zeta_{n} are calculated analytically without any fitting parameters. The obtained values are in amazing agreement with the experimental results of the Bodenschatz group. A new relation connecting the Lagrangian structure functions of different orders analogously to the extended self-similarity ansatz is found.     

Lagrangian view of time irreversibility of fluid turbulence

A turbulent flow is maintained by an external supply of kinetic energy, which is eventually dissipated into heat at steep velocity gradients. The scale at which energy is supplied greatly differs from the scale at which energy is dissipated, the more so as the turbulent intensity(the Reynolds number) is larger. The resulting energy flux over the range of scales, intermediate between energy injection and dissipation, acts as a source of time irreversibility. As it is now possible to follow accurately fluid particles in a turbulent flow field, both from laboratory experiments and from numerical simulations, a natural question arises: how do we detect time irreversibility from these Lagrangian data? Here we discuss recent results concerning this problem. For Lagrangian statistics involving more than one fluid particle, the distance between fluid particles introduces an intrinsic length scale into the problem. The evolution of quantities dependent on the relative motion between these fluid particles, including the kinetic energy in the relative motion, or the configuration of an initially isotropic structure can be related to the equal-time correlation functions of the velocity field, and is therefore sensitive to the energy flux through scales, hence to the irreversibility of the flow. In contrast, for singleparticle Lagrangian statistics, the most often studied velocity structure functions cannot distinguish the "arrow of time". Recent observations from experimental and numerical simulation data, however, show that the change of kinetic energy following the particle motion, is sensitive to time-reversal. We end the survey with a brief discussion of the implication of this line of work.     

Ion-acoustic turbulence and anomalous transport

We present results for the dynamics of evolution of non-linear state plasmas in a d.c. electric field which causes ion-acoustic turbulence (IAT). We look at (1) the time variation of the drift electron velocity and of the effective collision frequency, (2) features of the redistribution and heating of resonance ions, (3) the evolution of the spectral and angular distribution of turbulent pulsations, (4) processes of heating of the bulk of the particles. The results of an analytical IAT theory are compared with computer simulations.Special attention is paid to the theory of inhomogeneous plasmas with IAT. A self-consistent theory of anomalous transport is presented. We discuss the anisotropy of anomalous transport and the influence of non-Maxwellian particle velocity distributions on the transport processes. The electromagnetic properties, self-organization and hydrodynamic instability of plasmas with IAT are discussed.