Solenoidal Scaling Laws for Compressible Mixing. Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • Mixing of passive scalars in compressible turbulence does not obey the same classical Reynolds number scaling as its incompressible counterpart. We first show from a large database of direct numerical simulations that even the solenoidal part of the velocity field fails to follow the classical incompressible scaling when the forcing includes a substantial dilatational component. Though the dilatational effects on the flow remain significant, our main results are that both the solenoidal energy spectrum and the passive scalar spectrum assume incompressible forms, and that the scalar gradient essentially aligns with the most compressive eigenvalue of the solenoidal part, provided that only the solenoidal components are consistently used for scaling. A slight refinement of this statement is also pointed out.

published proceedings

  • Phys Rev Lett

altmetric score

  • 1.25

author list (cited authors)

  • Panickacheril John, J., Donzis, D. A., & Sreenivasan, K. R.

citation count

  • 7

complete list of authors

  • Panickacheril John, John||Donzis, Diego A||Sreenivasan, Katepalli R

publication date

  • November 2019