Asymmetry of velocity increments in turbulence

Abstract

We use well-resolved direct numerical simulations of high-Reynolds-number turbulence to study a fundamental statistical property of turbulence -- the asymmetry of velocity increments -- with likely implications on important dynamics. This property, ignored by existing small-scale phenomenological models, manifests most prominently in the non-monotonic trend of velocity increment moments (or structure functions) with the moment order, and in differences between ordinary and absolute structure functions for a given separation distance. We show that high-order structure functions arise nearly entirely from the negative side of the probability density of velocity increments, essentially removing the ambiguity between ordinary and absolute moments, and provide a plausible dynamical interpretation of this result.

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Cited by in corpus (1)

• Dependence of the asymptotic energy dissipation on third-order velocity scaling