Abstract
The vortical structure of homogeneous turbulence is the subject of this paper. Unsteady, three dimensional vorticity is the essential attribute of turbulence. The question we address here is the distribution of this vorticity. We know that turbulence exhibits strong intermittency. Is this intermittency intertwined with an intense vortical structure? Figure 1 shows an instantaneous cross-sectional view of the turbulent flow behind a grid. The figure summarizes our notion of what homogeneous isotropic turbulence is. There is a multitude of scales, seemingly randomly distributed. There is a multitude of structures, seemingly randomly oriented. And, when observed in sequence, the pictures are changing seemingly randomly in time. The question here is if there are basic building blocks in the flow and if so, what their structures might be. A common view is that there are coherent structures which ought to be the building blocks. As to what they are seems to depend on the flow. In particular, homogeneous isotropic turbulence, which is the most studied of turbulent flows (Batchelor [1]), presents the stiffest challenge for confirmation due to the lack of large-scale vortical structures like those in shear flows. In this regard, numerical studies are ahead of experimentation. Experimentally, the question translates first to identifying and second to quantifying the building block in figure 1.
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Dedicated to Paul M. Naghdi on the occasion of his 70th birthday
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© 1995 Birkhäuser Verlag Basel/Switzerland
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Jacob, J.D., Savaş, Ö. (1995). Experimental evidence for intense vortical structures in grid turbulence. In: Casey, J., Crochet, M.J. (eds) Theoretical, Experimental, and Numerical Contributions to the Mechanics of Fluids and Solids. Birkhäuser Basel. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-0348-9229-2_36
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-0348-9229-2_36
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