Structural Studies of Decaying Fluid Turbulence: Effect of Initial Conditions

Abstract

We present results from a systematic numerical study of structural properties of an unforced, incompressible, homogeneous, and isotropic three-dimensional turbulent fluid with an initial energy spectrum that develops a cascade of kinetic energy to large wavenumbers. The results are compared with those from a recently studied set of power-law initial energy spectra [C. Kalelkar and R. Pandit, Phys. Rev. E, {\bf 69}, 046304 (2004)] which do not exhibit such a cascade. Differences are exhibited in plots of vorticity isosurfaces, the temporal evolution of the kinetic energy-dissipation rate, and the rates of production of the mean enstrophy along the principal axes of the strain-rate tensor. A crossover between non-`cascade-type' and `cascade-type' behaviour is shown numerically for a specific set of initial energy spectra.

9 pages, 27 figures, Accepted for publication in Physical Review E

References in corpus (2)

• The Decay of Magnetohydrodynamic Turbulence from Power-Law Initial Conditions
• Scaling and the prediction of energy spectra in decaying hydrodynamic turbulence

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Statistical Properties of Turbulence: An Overview
• Systematics of the magnetic-Prandtl-number dependence of homogeneous, isotropic magnetohydrodynamic turbulence
• Statistics of Pressure Fluctuations in Decaying, Isotropic Turbulence