Self-organization and transition to turbulence in isotropic fluid motion driven by negative damping at low wavenumbers

Abstract

We observe a symmetry-breaking transition from a turbulent to a self-organized state in direct numerical simulation of the Navier-Stokes equation at very low Reynolds number. In this self-organized state the kinetic energy is contained only in modes at the lowest resolved wavenumber, the skewness vanishes, and visualization of the flows shows a lack of small-scale structure, with the vorticity and velocity vectors becoming aligned (a Beltrami flow).

10 pages, 5 figures including references. A video is available at stacks.iop.org/jpa/48/25FT01/mmedia

References in corpus (3)

• Energy transfer and dissipation in forced isotropic turbulence
• Spectral analysis of structure functions and their scaling exponents in forced isotropic turbulence
• Self-organisation and non-linear dynamics in driven magnetohydrodynamic turbulent flows

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Reynolds-number dependence of the dimensionless dissipation rate in homogeneous magnetohydrodynamic turbulence
• Does intermittency affect the inertial transfer rate in stationary isotropic turbulence?