We present high-resolution direct numerical simulations of turbulent three-dimensional Rayleigh-Benard convection with a focus on the Lagrangian properties of the flow. The volume is a Cartesian slab with an aspect ratio of four bounded by free-slip planes at the top and bottom and with periodic side walls. The turbulence is inhomogeneous with respect to the vertical direction. This manifests in different lateral and vertical two-particle dispersion and in a dependence of the dispersion on the initial tracer position for short and intermediate times. Similar to homogeneous isotropic turbulence, the dispersion properties depend in addition on the initial pair separation and yield a short-range Richardson-like scaling regime of two-particle dispersion for initial separations close to the Kolmogorov dissipation length. The Richardson constant is about half the value of homogeneous isotropic turbulence. The multiparticle statistics is very close to the homogeneous isotropic case. Clusters of four Lagrangian tracers show a clear trend to form flat, almost coplanar objects in the long-time limit and deviate from the Gaussian prediction. Significant efforts have been taken to resolve the statistics of the acceleration components up to order four correctly. We find that the vertical acceleration is less intermittent than the lateral one. The joint statistics of the vertical acceleration with the local convective and conductive heat flux suggests that rising and falling thermal plumes are not associated with the largest acceleration magnitudes. It turns out also that the Nusselt number which is calculated in the Lagrangian frame converges slowly in time to the standard Eulerian one.
We present a fluid dynamics video which illustrates the Lagrangian aspects of local heat transfer in turbulent Rayleigh-Benard convection. The data are obtained from a direct numerical simulation.
We analyze the blowup (finite-time singularity) in inviscid shell models of convective turbulence. We show that the blowup exists and its internal structure undergoes a series of bifurcations under a change of shell model parameter. Various blowup structures are observed and explained, which vary from self-similar to periodic, quasi-periodic and chaotic regimes. Though the blowup takes sophisticated forms, its asymptotic small-scale structure is independent of initial conditions, i.e., universal. Finally, we discuss implications of the obtained results for the open problems of blowup in invisc…
The irregular reversals of wind direction in convective turbulence are found to have fluctuating intervals that can be related to critical behavior. It is shown that the net magnetization of a 2D Ising lattice of finite size fluctuates in the same way. Detrended fluctuation analysis of the wind reversal time series results in a scaling behavior that agrees with that of the Ising problem. The properties found suggest that the wind reversal phenomenon exhibits signs of self-organized criticality.
The characterization of heat and momentum fluxes in wall-bounded turbulence is of paramount importance for a plethora of applications, ranging from engineering to Earth sciences. However, how the turbulent structures associated with velocity and temperature fluctuations interact to produce the emergent flux signatures, is not evident till date. In this work, we investigate this fundamental issue by studying the switching patterns of intermittently occurring turbulent fluctuations from one state to another, a phenomenon called persistence. We discover that the persistence patterns for heat and …
Convective turbulence in a Rayleigh Benard system has shown a marked reluctance to exhibit clear scaling in the energy or entropy spectrum. The recent numerical simulation of Pandey, Verma and Mishra has shown significantly better evidence of scaling in the infinite Prandtl number limit. This prompted us to look at this limit analytically. We find that the inevitable presence of sweeping helps give a very good understanding of the results of Pandey et. al. In the presence of rotation, the Rayleigh number dependence of the Nusselt number shows a strong increase in slope in recent experiments an…
Large-scale intermittency is a widely observed phenomenon in convective surface layer turbulence that induces non-Gaussian temperature statistics, while such signature is not observed for velocity signals. Although approaches based on probability density functions have been used so far, those are not able to explain to what extent the signals' temporal structure impacts the statistical characteristics of the velocity and temperature fluctuations. To tackle this issue, a visibility network analysis is carried out on a field-experimental dataset from a convective atmospheric surface layer flow. …
Formation and evolution of turbulence in convectively unstable internal solitary waves of depression shoaling over gentle slopes in the South China Sea
Studying the atmospheric Planetary Boundary Layer (PBL) is crucial to understand the climate of a planet. The meteorological measurements by the instruments onboard InSight at a latitude of 4.5$^{\circ}$N make a uniquely rich dataset to study the active turbulent dynamics of the daytime PBL on Mars. Here we use the high-sensitivity continuous pressure, wind, temperature measurements in the first 400 sols of InSight operations (from northern late winter to midsummer) to analyze wind gusts, convective cells and vortices in Mars' daytime PBL. We compare InSight measurements to turbulence-resolvin…
Lagrangian studies of the local temperature mixing and heat transport in turbulent Rayleigh-Benard convection are presented, based on three-dimensional direct numerical simulations. Contrary to vertical pair distances, the temporal growth of lateral pair distances agrees with the Richardson law, but yields a smaller Richardson constant due to correlated pair motion in plumes. Our results thus imply that Richardson dispersion is also found in anisotropic turbulence. We find that extremely large vertical accelerations appear less frequently than lateral ones and are not connected with rising or …
The Lagrangian view of passive scalar turbulence has recently produced interesting results and interpretations. Innovations in theory, experiments, simulations and data analysis of Lagrangian turbulence are reviewed here in brief. Part of the review is closely related to the so-called Kraichnan model for the advection of the passive scalar in synthetic turbulence. Possible implications for a better understanding of the passive scalar mixing in Navier-Stokes turbulence are also discussed.
Plumes in a convective flow are considered to be relevant to the turbulent transport in convection. The effective mass, momentum, and heat transports in the convective turbulence are investigated in the framework of time--space double averaging procedure, where a field quantity is decomposed into three parts: the spatiotemporal mean (spatial average of the time-averaged) field, the dispersion or coherent fluctuation, and the random or incoherent fluctuation. With this framework, turbulent correlations in the mean-field equations are divided into the dispersion/coherent and random/incoherent co…
The vectoral wind structure of daytime atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) turbulence is strongly dependent on the balance between shear-driven turbulence production of horizontal fluctuations (driven by winds at the mesoscale), and buoyancy-driven turbulence production of vertical velocity fluctuations (driven by solar heating), characterized by the global instability state parameter $-z_i/L > 0$. In the fully shear-driven neutral limit $-z_i/L \rightarrow 0$, the surface layer is dominated by coherent streamwise-elongated concentrations of negative streamwise fluctuating velocity (low-speed str…
Non-isothermal particles suspended in a fluid lead to complex interactions -- the particles respond to changes in the fluid flow, which in turn is modified by their temperature anomaly. Here, we perform a novel proof-of-concept numerical study based on tracer particles that are thermally coupled to the fluid. We imagine that particles can adjust their internal temperature reacting to some local fluid properties and follow simple, hard-wired active control protocols. We study the case where instabilities are induced by switching the particle temperature from hot to cold depending on whether it …
A closure theory is developed for inhomogeneous turbulent flow, which enables a systematic derivation of the turbulence constitutive relations without relying on any empirical parameters. Renormalized-perturbation approximation is performed in the convective coordinate frame based on the mean flow, successfully incorporating the convective integration in generally covariant manner.
In this paper we present a unified shell model for stably stratified and convective turbulence. Numerical simulation of this model for stably stratified flow shows Bolgiano-Obukhbov scaling in which the kinetic energy spectrum varies as $k^{-11/5}$. We also observe a dual scaling ($k^{-11/5}$ and $k^{-5/3}$) for a limited range of parameters. The shell model of convective turbulence yields Kolmogorov's spectrum. These results are consistent with the energy flux and energy feed due to buoyancy, and are in good agreement with direct numerical simulations of Kumar {\em et al.} [Phys. Rev. E {\bf …
We perform experimental study of turbulent transport of nanoparticles in convective turbulence with the Rayleigh number $\sim 10^8$ in the air flow. We measure temperature field in many locations by a temperature probe equipped with 11 E-thermocouples. Nanoparticles of the size $\sim 70$ nm in diameter are produced by Advanced Electrospray Aerosol Generator. To determine the number density of nanoparticles, we use Condensation Particle Counter. We demonstrate that the joint action of turbulent effects (which are important in the core flow) and molecular effects (which are essential near the bo…
The orientational dynamics of inertialess anisotropic particles transported by two-dimensional convective turbulent flows display a coexistence of regular and chaotic features. We numerically demonstrate that very elongated particles (rods) align preferentially with the direction of the fluid flow, i.e., horizontally close to the isothermal walls and dominantly vertically in the bulk. This behaviour is due to the the presence of a persistent large scale circulation flow structure, which induces strong shear at wall boundaries and in up/down-welling regions. The near-wall horizontal alignment o…
We present a numerical investigation of two-dimensional decaying turbulence in the Lagrangian framework. Focusing on single particle statistics, we investigate Lagrangian trajectories in a freely evolving turbulent velocity field. The dynamical evolution of the tracer particles is strongly dominated by the emergence and evolution of coherent structures. For a statistical analysis we focus on the Lagrangian acceleration as a central quantity. For more geometrical aspects we investigate the curvature along the trajectories. We find strong signatures for self-similar universal behavior.
Mean-field-based Lagrangian framework is developed for the fluid turbulence theory. The space- time vector flow is naturally introduced from the mean velocity, which provides the Lagrangian picture based on the mean field in totally equivalent manner to that of the instantaneous field. The proposed framework is applied, on one hand, to one-point closure model, yielding an objective expression of the turbulence visco-elastic effect. Application to two-point closure, on the other hand, is also discussed, where natural extension of known Lagrangian correlation is discovered on the basis of extend…
The angle between subsequent particle displacement increments is evaluated as a function of the timelag in isotropic turbulence. It is shown that the evolution of this angle contains two well-defined power-laws, reflecting the multi-scale dynamics of high-Reynolds number turbulence. The proba-bility density function of the directional change is shown to be self-similar and well approximated by an analytically derived model assuming Gaussianity and independence of the velocity and the Lagrangian acceleration.
Thermal plumes are the energy containing eddy motions that carry heat and momentum in a convective boundary layer. The detailed understanding of their structure is of fundamental interest for a range of applications, from wall-bounded engineering flows to quantifying surface-atmosphere flux exchanges. We address the aspect of Reynolds stress anisotropy associated with the intermittent nature of heat transport in thermal plumes by performing an invariant analysis of the Reynolds stress tensor in an unstable atmospheric surface layer flow, using a field-experimental dataset. Given the intermitte…
The Lagrangian and Eulerian transversal velocity structure functions of fully developed fluid turbulence are found basing on the Navier-Stokes equation. The structure functions are shown to obey the scaling relations inside the inertial range. The scaling exponents are calculated analytically without using dimensional considerations. The obtained values are in a very good agreement with recent numerical and experimental data.
In Lagrangian turbulence one is faced with the puzzle that 2D Navier-Stokes flows are nearly as intermittent as in three dimensions although no intermittency is present in the inverse cascade in 2D Eulerian turbulence. In addition, an inertial range is very difficult to detect and it is questionable whether it exists at all. Here, we investigate the transition of Eulerian to Lagrangian probability density functions (PDFs) which leads to a new type of Lagrangian structure function. This possesses an extended inertial range similar to the case of tracer particles in a frozen turbulent velocity f…
Direct numerical simulations have been performed for turbulent thermal convection between horizontal no-slip, permeable walls with a distance $H$ and a constant temperature difference $ΔT$ at the Rayleigh number $Ra=3\times10^{3}-10^{10}$. On the no-slip wall surfaces $z=0$, $H$ the wall-normal (vertical) transpiration velocity is assumed to be proportional to the local pressure fluctuation, i.e. $w=-βp'/ρ, +βp'/ρ$ (Jiménez et al., J. Fluid Mech., vol. 442, 2001, pp. 89-117), and the property of the permeable wall is given by the permeability parameter $βU$ normalised with the buoyancy-induced…
We provide evidence that the small-scale statistics of the acceleration of a test particle in high-Reynolds number Lagrangian turbulence is correctly described by Tsallis statistics with entropic index q=3/2. We present theoretical arguments why Tsallis statistics can naturally arise in Lagrangian turbulence and why at the smallest scales q=3/2 is relevant. A generalized Heisenberg-Yaglom formula is derived from the nonextensive model.
We report on probability-density-functions (PDF) of the mass density in numerical simulations of highly compressible hydrodynamic flows and the corresponding structure formation of Lagrangian particles advected by the flows. Numerical simulations were performed with $512^3$ collocation points and 2 million tracer particles integrated over several dynamical times. We propose a connection between the PDF of the Lagrangian tracer particles and the predicted log-normal distribution of the density fluctuations in isothermal systems.
Three-dimensional (3D) hydrodynamic simulations of shell oxygen burning (Meakin and Arnett 2007) exhibit bursty, recurrent fluctuations in turbulent kinetic energy. These are shown to be due to a global instability in the convective region, which has been suppressed in calculations of stellar evolution which use mixing-length theory (MLT). Quantitatively similar behavior occurs in the model of a convective roll (cell) of Lorenz (1963), which is known to have a strange attractor that gives rise to random fluctuations in time.An extension of the Lorenz model, which includes Kolmogorov damping an…
We report on simulations of two-dimensional turbulence in the inverse energy cascade regime. Focusing on the statistics of Lagrangian tracer particles, scaling behavior of the probability density functions of velocity fluctuations is investigated. The results are compared to the three-dimensional case. In particular an analysis in terms of compensated cumulants reveals the transition from a strong non-Gaussian behavior with large tails to Gaussianity. The reported computation of correlation functions for the acceleration components sheds light on the underlying dynamics of the tracer particles…
The Lagrangian velocity structure functions in the inertial range of fully developed fluid turbulence are derived basing on the Navier-Stokes equations. For time $τ$ much smaller than the correlation time, the structure functions are shown to obey the scaling relations $K_n(τ)\propto τ^{ζ_n}$. The scaling exponents $ζ_n$ are calculated analytically. The obtained values are in amazing agreement with the unique experimental results of the Bodenschatz group \cite{Bod2}. New notion -- the Lagrangian position structure functions $R_n(τ)$ is introduced. All the $R_n$ of the order $n>3$ are shown to …
Horizontally extended turbulent convection, termed mesoscale convection in natural systems, remains a challenge to investigate in both experiments and simulations. This is particularly so for very low molecular Prandtl numbers as in stellar convection and in Earth's outer core. The present study reports three-dimensional direct numerical simulations of turbulent Rayleigh-Bénard convection in square boxes of side length $L$ and height $H$ with the aspect ratio $Γ=L/H$ of 25, for Prandtl numbers that span almost 4 orders of magnitude, $10^{-3}\le Pr \le 7$, and Rayleigh numbers $10^5 \le Ra \le …
We introduce a simple variational principle for coherent material vortices in two-dimensional turbulence. Vortex boundaries are sought as closed stationary curves of the averaged Lagrangian strain. Solutions to this problem turn out to be mathematically equivalent to photon spheres around black holes in cosmology. The fluidic photon spheres satisfy explicit differential equations whose outermost limit cycles are optimal Lagrangian vortex boundaries. As an application, we uncover super-coherent material eddies in the South Atlantic, which yield specific Lagrangian transport estimates for Agulha…
New aspects of turbulence are uncovered if one considers flow motion from the perspective of a fluid particle (known as the Lagrangian approach) rather than in terms of a velocity field (the Eulerian viewpoint). Using a new experimental technique, based on the scattering of ultrasounds, we have obtained a direct measurement of particle velocities, resolved at all scales, in a fully turbulent flow. It enables us to approach intermittency in turbulence from a dynamical point of view and to analyze the Lagrangian velocity fluctuations in the framework of random walks. We find experimentally that …
The Recent Fluid Deformation Closure (RFDC) model of lagrangian turbulence is recast in path-integral language within the framework of the Martin-Siggia-Rose functional formalism. In order to derive analytical expressions for the velocity-gradient probability distribution functions (vgPDFs), we carry out noise renormalization in the low-frequency regime and find approximate extrema for the Martin-Siggia-Rose effective action. We verify, with the help of Monte Carlo simulations, that the vgPDFs so obtained yield a close description of the single-point statistical features implied by the origina…
For the phenomenological description of magnetohydrodynamic turbulence competing models exist, e.g. Boldyrev [Phys.Rev.Lett. \textbf{96}, 115002, 2006] and Gogoberidze [Phys.Plas. \textbf{14}, 022304, 2007], which predict the same Eulerian inertial-range scaling of the turbulent energy spectrum although they employ fundamentally different basic interaction mechanisms. {A relation is found that links} the Lagrangian frequency spectrum {with} the autocorrelation timescale of the turbulent fluctuations, $τ_\mathrm{ac}$, and the associated cascade timescale, $τ_{\mathrm{cas}}$. Thus, the Lagrangia…
We show by direct numerical simulation (DNS) that the Lagrangian cross correlation of velocity gradients in homogeneous isotropic turbulence increases at short times, whereas its auto-correlation decreases. Kinematic considerations allow to show that two invariants of the turbulent velocity field determine the short-time velocity gradient correlations. In order to get a more intuitive understanding of the dynamics for longer times, heuristic models are proposed involving the combined action of local shear and rotation. These models quantitatively reproduce the effects and disentangle the diffe…
Using the Lagrangian transport of momentum, the Reynolds shear stress can be expressed in terms of basic turbulence parameters. In this view, the Reynolds stress gradient represents the lateral transport of streamwise momentum, balanced by the u2 transport, pressure and shear force terms in the momentum equation. We extend this formalism to other turbulence parameters such as diagonal components of the Reynolds stress, and also to more complex flows (boundary layer flows with adverse pressure gradients and pipe flows with swirl). Data from direct numerical simulations (DNS) are used to validat…
Particles in turbulence frequently encounter extreme accelerations between extended periods of quiescence. The occurrence of extreme events is closely related to the intermittent spatial distribution of intense flow structures such as vorticity filaments. This mixed history of flow conditions leads to very complex particle statistics with a pronounced scale dependence, which presents one of the major challenges on the way to a non-equilibrium statistical mechanics of turbulence. Here, we introduce the notion of persistent Lagrangian acceleration, quantified by the squared particle acceleration…
Based on direct numerical simulations with point-like inertial particles, with Stokes numbers, $\textrm{St}=0, 0.5$, $3$, and $6$, transported by homogeneous and isotropic turbulent flows, we present in this letter for the first time evidence for the existence of Markov property in Lagrangian turbulence. We show that the Markov property is valid for a finite step size larger than a Stokes number-dependent Einstein-Markov coherence time scale. This enables the description of multi-scale statistics of Lagrangian particles by Fokker-Planck equations, which can be embedded in an interdisciplinary …
Using time-resolved measurements of the orientation of rigid inertial fibers in a turbulence-tank, we investigate the autocorrelation of their tumbling rate. The correlation time ($τ_d$) is well predicted by Kolmogorov inertial-range scaling based on the fiber length (L) when the fiber inertia can be neglected. For inertial fibers, we propose a simple model considering fiber inertia (measured by a tumbling Stokes number) and a viscous torque which accurately predicts both the correlation time and the variance of the tumbling rate.
We study the effect of different forcing functions and of the local gradient Richardson number Rig on the vertical mixing of Lagrangian tracers in stably stratified turbulence under the Boussinesq approximation, and present a wave and continuous-time random walk model for single- and two- particle vertical dispersion. The model consists of a random superposition of linear waves with their amplitude based on the observed Lagrangian spectrum of vertical velocity, and a random walk process to capture overturning that depends on the statistics of Rig among other Eulerian quantities. The model is i…
Persistence is defined as the probability that the local value of a fluctuating field remains at a particular state for a certain amount of time, before being switched to another state. The concept of persistence has been found to have many diverse practical applications, ranging from non-equilibrium statistical mechanics to financial dynamics to distribution of time scales in turbulent flows and many more. In this study, we carry out a detailed analysis of the statistical characteristics of the persistence probability density functions (PDFs) of velocity and temperature fluctuations in the su…
The statistical properties of the Lagrangian acceleration vector of passive tracers in statistically-steady rotating turbulence is studied by Particle Tracking Velocimetry. Direct effects of the background rotation are the suppression of high-acceleration events parallel to the (vertical) rotation axis, the enhancement of high-acceleration events for the horizontal acceleration, and the strong amplification of the auto-correlation of the acceleration component perpendicular to both the rotation vector Ω and local velocity vector u. The auto-correlation of the acceleration component in the plan…
