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).

arXiv comment10 pages, 5 figures including references. A video is available at stacks.iop.org/jpa/48/25FT01/mmedia

References in corpus (4)

• 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
• Investigation of the transfer and dissipation of energy in isotropic turbulence

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Spatio-temporal intermittency of the turbulent energy cascade
• Sudden relaminarisation and lifetimes in forced isotropic turbulence
• Reynolds-number dependence of the dimensionless dissipation rate in homogeneous magnetohydrodynamic turbulence
• Onset criteria for freely decaying isotropic turbulence
• Comparison of forcing functions in magnetohydrodynamic turbulence
• Noisy Transitional Flows in Imperfect Channels
• Does intermittency affect the inertial transfer rate in stationary isotropic turbulence?