Is the Scaling of Supersonic Turbulence Universal?

Abstract

The statistical properties of turbulence are considered to be universal at sufficiently small length scales, i. e., independent of boundary conditions and large-scale forces acting on the fluid. Analyzing data from numerical simulations of supersonic turbulent flow driven by external forcing, we demonstrate that this is not generally true for the two-point velocity statistics of compressible turbulence. However, a reformulation of the refined similarity hypothesis in terms of the mass-weighted velocity rho^(1/3)v yields scaling laws that are almost insensitive to the forcing. The results imply that the most intermittent dissipative structures are shocks closely following the scaling of Burgers turbulence.

4 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication by Phys. Rev. Lett

References in corpus (1)

• The Statistics of Supersonic Isothermal Turbulence

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