Adaptive resolution refinement for pseudospectral simulations of isotropic homogeneous turbulence

Pseudospectral simulations of homogeneous turbulence provide an important class of benchmark flow problems used for fundamental studies of turbulence and for numerical validation purposes. Depending on the numerical resolution, fully resolved computations of homogeneous turbulence can consume large amounts of central processing unit (CPU) time. Here, we present an approach analogous to adaptive mesh refinement for computations performed in physical space to adaptively refine the spectral resolution for pseudospectral computations of isotropic homogeneous turbulent flows. The method is applied to simulations of two-dimensional and three-dimensional isotropic homogeneous turbulence, and the results are compared with direct numerical simulations (DNS) performed using a fixed fine mesh. Significant savings in computational time are found in each case, with little to no compromise in the accuracy of the solutions.