Lyapunov exponents and information dimension of the mass distribution in turbulent compressible flows

Turbulent density fluctuations in isothermal highly compressible turbulent flows are highly clumped and can be quantified by the scaling properties of powers of the mass distribution. This Eulerian quantity can be related to Lagrangian properties of the system given by the Lyapunov exponents of tracer particles advected with the flow. Using highly resolved numerical simulations, we show that the Kaplan-Yorke conjecture holds within numerical uncertainties.     

Superpersistent chaotic transients in physical space: advective dynamics of inertial particles in open chaotic flows under noise

Superpersistent chaotic transients are characterized by an exponential-like scaling law for their lifetimes where the exponent in the exponential dependence diverges as a parameter approaches a critical value. So far this type of transient chaos has been illustrated exclusively in the phase space of dynamical systems. Here we report the phenomenon of noise-induced superpersistent transients in physical space and explain the associated scaling law based on the solutions to a class of stochastic differential equations. The context of our study is advective dynamics of inertial particles in open chaotic flows. Our finding makes direct experimental observation of superpersistent chaotic transients feasible. It also has implications to problems of current concern such as the transport and trapping of chemically or biologically active particles in large-scale flows.     

Reacting particles in open chaotic flows

We study the collision probability p of particles advected by open flows with chaotic advection. We show that p scales with the particle size (or, alternatively, reaction distance) δ as a power law whose coefficient is determined by the fractal dimensions of the invariant sets defined by the advection dynamics. We also argue that this same scaling also holds for the reaction rate of active particles in the low-density regime. These analytical results are compared to numerical simulations, and they are found to agree very well.     

Structure function scaling in compressible super-Alfvénic MHD turbulence

Supersonic turbulent flows of magnetized gas are believed to play an important role in the dynamics of star-forming clouds in galaxies. Understanding statistical properties of such flows is crucial for developing a theory of star formation. In this Letter we propose a unified approach for obtaining the velocity scaling in compressible and super-Alfvénic turbulence, valid for the arbitrary sonic Mach number, M(S). We demonstrate with numerical simulations that the scaling can be described with the She-Lévêque formalism, where only one parameter, interpreted as the Hausdorff dimension of the most intense dissipative structures, needs to be varied as a function of M(S). Our results thus provide a method for obtaining the velocity scaling in interstellar clouds once their Mach numbers have been inferred from observations.     

Vortex stretching and reconnection in a compressible fluid

Vortex stretching in a compressible fluid is considered. Two-dimensional (2D) and axisymmetric cases are considered separately. The flows associated with the vortices are perpendicular to the plane of the uniform straining flows. Externally-imposed density build-up near the axis leads to enhanced compactness of the vortices — “dressed" vortices (in analogy to “dressed" charged particles in a dielectric system). The compressible vortex flow solutions in the 2D as well as axisymmetric cases identify a length scale relevant for the compressible case which leads to the Kadomtsev-Petviashvili spectrum for compressible turbulence. Vortex reconnection process in a compressible fluid is shown to be possible even in the inviscid case — compressibility leads to defreezing of vortex lines in the fluid.     

Sticky Behavior of Fluid Particles in the Compressible Kraichnan Model

We consider the compressible Kraichnan model of turbulent advection with small molecular diffusivity and velocity field regularized at short scales to mimic the effects of viscosity. As noted in ref 5, removing those two regularizations in two opposite orders for intermediate values of compressibility gives Lagrangian flows with quite different properties. Removing the viscous regularization before diffusivity leads to the explosive separation of trajectories of fluid particles whereas turning the regularizations off in the opposite order results in coalescence of Lagrangian trajectories. In the present paper we re-examine the situation first addressed in ref 6 in which the Prandtl number is varied when the regularizations are removed. We show that an appropriate fine-tuning leads to a sticky behavior of trajectories which hit each other on and off spending a positive amount of time together. We examine the effect of such a trajectory behavior on the passive transport showing that it induces anomalous scaling of the stationary 2-point structure function of an advected tracer and influences the rate of condensation of tracer energy in the zero wavenumber mode.     

Compressible turbulence: Multi-fractal scaling in the transition to the dissipative regime

Multi-fractal scaling in the transition to the dissipative regime for fully-developed compressible turbulence is considered. The multi-fractal power law scaling behavior breaks down for very small length scales thanks to viscous effects. However, the effect of compressibility is found to extend the single-scaling multi-fractal regime further into the dissipative range. In the ultimate compressibility limit, thanks to the shock waves which are the appropriate dissipative structures, the single-scaling regime is found to extend indeed all the way into the full viscous regime. This result appears to be consistent with the physical fact that vortices become more resilient and stretch stronger in a compressible fluid hence postponing viscous intervention. The consequent generation of enhanced velocity gradients in a compressible fluid appears to provide an underlying physical basis for the previous results indicating that fully-developed compressible turbulence is effectively more dissipative than its incompressible counterpart.     

A turbulence characteristic length scale for compressible flows

The current RANS models are generally established and calibrated under incompressible condition and these kinds of models could succeed in predicting many features of incompressible flows. However, these models extended to the high-speed, compressible flows are always less accurate. In the paper, a compressible von Kármán length scale is proposed for compressible flows considering the variable densities. It contains no empirical coefficients and is based on phenomenological theory. In the turbulent kinetic equation, the extra unclosed terms induced by non-constant densities are treated as dissipation terms and the equation is closed algebraically via the introduction of the von Kármán length scale. The original and the proposed von Kármán length scale lead to two different kinds of SAS (scale adaption simulation) models, KDO (turbulence kinetic energy dependent only) and CKDO (compressible KDO), respectively. Compressible mixing layer with significant compressibility is studied within standard k–?, k–ω, KDO turbulence models and their compressible versions. The compressibility effects such as the reduced mixing layer thickness, growth rate and turbulence intensity can be reproduced by CKDO. The new length scale can improve the performances of the model in predicting the mixing layer thickness, stream-wise velocity and Reynolds shear stresses when the convective Mach number is 0.8. Besides, the new length scale also leads to accurate computed growth rate when the convective Mach number ranges from 0.1 to 1.0.     

Kolmogorov-Kraichnan scaling in the inverse energy cascade of two-dimensional plasma turbulence

Turbulence in plasmas that are magnetically confined, such as tokamaks or linear devices, is two dimensional or at least quasi two dimensional due to the strong magnetic field, which leads to extreme elongation of the fluctuations, if any, in the direction parallel to the magnetic field. These plasmas are also compressible fluid flows obeying the compressible Navier-Stokes equations. This Letter presents the first comprehensive scaling of the structure functions of the density and velocity fields up to 10th order in the PISCES linear plasma device and up to 6th order in the Mega-Ampère Spherical Tokamak (MAST). In the two devices, it is found that the scaling of the turbulent fields is in good agreement with the prediction of the Kolmogorov-Kraichnan theory for two-dimensional turbulence in the energy cascade subrange.     

Scaling Law for Ablation of a Hydrogen Pellet in a Plasma

A scaling law is derived which gives the rate of ablation of a frozen hydrogen pellet immersed in a plasma without the presence of a magnetic field or space charge. Plasma particles penetrate the ablating gas-plasma cloud to the evaporating pellet surface and deliver power to the cloud to drive its expansion. The evaporation rate is determined by a "self-regulating" mechanism. The ablation time is shown to be proportional to a5/3?o-2/3?o-1/3 where a is the pellet radius, ?o is the effective penetration depth of the incident particle into solid hydrogen and ?o is the power flux density of the incident particles. It is found that for ablation in a thermonuclear plasma, the alpha particles significantly affect the ablation rate. For thermonuclear plasma electrons and alpha particles, the energy required to ablate one molecule is shown to be of the order of 10 eV or less. The scaling law is applied to presently available experimental results, and reasonable agreement is found.     

低Z流体的单次冲击波压缩极限

低Z流体的单次冲击波压缩极限是判断各种研究高压物态方程理论和实验正确与否的重要参数。维里定律和Hugoniot方程表明,单次冲击波压缩率是由各种因素的相对重要度决定的,包括平均势能、平均动能、内部自由度的激发度和逆幂函数型势能曲线的幂指数。如果幂指数大于2,相互作用势能使流体变得比理想气体更难压缩,否则流体就比理想气体更容易压缩。内部自由度的激发总是让流体变得更容易压缩。在各种不同因素起主导作用的压强段,低Z流体的单次冲击波压缩极限不同。用一个简单的单次冲击波压缩极限的表达式解释了低Z流体在离解区域和电离区域的行为。     

Nonlinear theory of magnetohydrodynamic flows of a compressible fluid in the shallow water approximation

Shallow water magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) theory describing incompressible flows of plasma is generalized to the case of compressible flows. A system of MHD equations is obtained that describes the flow of a thin layer of compressible rotating plasma in a gravitational field in the shallow water approximation. The system of quasilinear hyperbolic equations obtained admits a complete simple wave analysis and a solution to the initial discontinuity decay problem in the simplest version of nonrotating flows. In the new equations, sound waves are filtered out, and the dependence of density on pressure on large scales is taken into account that describes static compressibility phenomena. In the equations obtained, the mass conservation law is formulated for a variable that nontrivially depends on the shape of the lower boundary, the characteristic vertical scale of the flow, and the scale of heights at which the variation of density becomes significant. A simple wave theory is developed for the system of equations obtained. All self-similar discontinuous solutions and all continuous centered self-similar solutions of the system are obtained. The initial discontinuity decay problem is solved explicitly for compressible MHD equations in the shallow water approximation. It is shown that there exist five different configurations that provide a solution to the initial discontinuity decay problem. For each configuration, conditions are found that are necessary and sufficient for its implementation. Differences between incompressible and compressible cases are analyzed. In spite of the formal similarity between the solutions in the classical case of MHD flows of an incompressible and compressible fluids, the nonlinear dynamics described by the solutions are essentially different due to the difference in the expressions for the squared propagation velocity of weak perturbations. In addition, the solutions obtained describe new physical phenomena related to the dependence of the height of the free boundary on the density of the fluid. Self-similar continuous and discontinuous solutions are obtained for a system on a slope, and a solution is found to the initial discontinuity decay problem in this case.     

Photon-burst correlation techniques for atmospheric crosswind measurements

With a cw visible laser, the method of photon-burst correlation is used measure atmospheric crosswinds. A scaling law, including the effects of atmospheric turbulence, for performance evaluation of both laser Doppler (LDV) and laser time-of-flight (LTV) velocimeters, is introduced theoretically and established experimentally with field experiments. Crosswind measurements in the night at a range of 500 m with a low-power argon-ion laser are reported. The measured signal particle arrival rate is consistent with the predicted arrival rate based on the scaling law. In addition to the use of higher laser power, it is suggested that with proper inclusion of signal photon bursts resulting from the simultaneous arrival of several particles, routine operation of this type of laser velocimeter for long ranges, up to 1000m, should be feasible.     

New scaling law for the decay exponent of bimolecular reactions in unbounded transitional flows

We propose a new scaling law for global kinetics of the stoichiometric reaction A+B-->P in unsteady, transitional flows. We find in the nonlinear flow regime the decay as approximately t(-alpha) where alpha is related to a space-time scaling parameter psi as alpha proportional, variant psi(m), for the considered parameter range m=0.067. In the linear flow regime, we find that the maximum is alpha approximately 2/3 for psi approximately 1. The proposed scaling law should be useful for linking dynamical subgrid processes with reaction kinetics in a variety of transitional flow systems.     

Rheology and contact lifetimes in dense granular flows

We study the rheology and distribution of interparticle contact lifetimes for gravity-driven, dense granular flows of noncohesive particles down an inclined plane using large-scale, three dimensional, granular dynamics simulations. Rather than observing a large number of long-lived contacts as might be expected for dense flows, brief binary collisions predominate. In the hard-particle limit, the rheology conforms to Bagnold scaling, where the shear stress is quadratic in the strain rate. As the particles are made softer, however, we find significant deviations from Bagnold rheology; the material flows more like a viscous fluid. We attribute this change in the collective rheology of the material to subtle changes in the contact lifetime distribution involving the increasing lifetime and number of the long-lived contacts in the softer particle systems.     

Explicit algebraic Reynolds stress model for compressible flow turbulence

Algebraic Reynolds stress model (ARSM) is often employed in practical turbulent flow simulations. Most of previous works on ARSM have been carried out for incompressible flows. In the present paper, a new ARSM model is suggested for compressible flows. The model adopts a compressibility factor function involving the turbulent Mach number and the gradient Mach number. Compared to incompressible flow, explicit solution for ARSM for compressible flow can hardly be obtained due to dilatation terms. We propose approximate representations for these dilatation-related terms to obtain an explicit procedure for compressible flow turbulence. The model is applied to compressible mixing layer, supersonic flat-plate boundary and planar supersonic wake flow. It is found that the model works very well yielding results that are in good agreement with the DNS and the experimental data.     

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.     

Multiple-relaxation-time lattice Boltzmann model for compressible fluids

We present an energy-conserving multiple-relaxation-time finite difference lattice Boltzmann model for compressible flows. The collision step is first calculated in the moment space and then mapped back to the velocity space. The moment space and corresponding transformation matrix are constructed according to the group representation theory. Equilibria of the nonconserved moments are chosen according to the need of recovering compressible Navier-Stokes equations through the Chapman-Enskog expansion. Numerical experiments showed that compressible flows with strong shocks can be well simulated by the present model. The new model works for both low and high speeds compressible flows. It contains more physical information and has better numerical stability and accuracy than its single-relaxation-time version.     

一种求解可压缩Navier-Stokes方程的隐式迭代时间推进方法

针对有壁面边界的可压缩流动问题,提出与基于非等距网格的高精度紧致型差分格式相结合的简化隐式迭代时间推进法,建立求解可压缩Navier-Stokes方程的直接数值模拟方法,提高了计算效率.应用该方法,直接数值模拟两种有壁面边界的二维可压缩流动问题,即可压缩平板边界层流动和可压缩槽道流动.     

Three-dimensional coupled double-distribution-function lattice Boltzmann models for compressible Navier–Stokes equations

Two three-dimensional (3D) lattice Boltzmann models in the framework of coupled double-distribution-function approach for compressible flows, in which specific-heat ratio and Prandtl number can be adjustable, are developed in this paper. The main differences between the two models are discrete equilibrium density and total energy distribution function. One is the D3Q25 model obtained from spherical function, and the other is the D3Q27 standard lattice model obtained from Hermite expansions of the corresponding continuous equilibrium distribution functions. The two models are tested by numerical simulations of some typical compressible flows, and their numerical stability and precision are also analysed. The results indicate that the two models are capable for supersonic flows, while the one from Hermite expansions is not suitable for compressible flows with shock waves.