Our recent work identifies material surfaces in incompressible flows that extremize the transport of an arbitrary, weakly diffusive scalar field relative to neighboring surfaces. Such barriers and enhancers of transport can be located directly from the deterministic component of the velocity field without diffusive or stochastic simulations. Here we extend these results to compressible flows and to diffusive concentration fields affected by sources or sinks, as well as by spontaneous decay. We construct diffusive transport extremizers with and without constraining them on a specific initial concentration distribution. For two-dimensional flows, we obtain explicit differential equations and a diagnostic scalar field that identify the most observable extremizers with pointwise uniform transport density. We illustrate our results by uncovering diffusion barriers and enhancers in analytic, numerical, and observational velocity fields.
We put forward the idea of defining vortex boundaries in planar flows as closed material barriers to the diffusive transport of vorticity. Such diffusive vortex boundaries minimize the leakage of vorticity from the fluid mass they enclose when compared to other nearby material curves. Building on recent results on passive diffusion barriers, we develop an algorithm for the automated identification of such structures from general, two-dimensional unsteady flow data. As examples, we identify vortex boundaries as vorticity diffusion barriers in two flows: an explicitly known laminar flow and a nu…
Our understanding of the material organization of complex fluid flows has recently benefited from mathematical developments in the theory of objective coherent structures. These methods have provided a wealth of approaches that identify transport barriers in three-dimensional (3D) turbulent flows. Specifically, theoretical advances have been incorporated into numerical algorithms that extract the most influential advective, diffusive and active barriers to transport from data sets in a frame-indifferent fashion. To date, however, there has been very limited investigation into these objectively…
We seek transport barriers and transport enhancers as material surfaces across which the transport of diffusive tracers is minimal or maximal in a general, unsteady flow. We find that such surfaces are extremizers of a universal, non-dimensional transport functional whose leading-order term in the diffusivity can be computed directly from the flow velocity. The most observable (uniform) transport extremizers are explicitly computable as null-surfaces of an objective transport tensor. Even in the limit of vanishing diffusivity, these surfaces differ from all previously identified coherent struc…
We introduce a Darcy-scale model to describe compressible multi-component flow in a fully saturated porous medium. In order to capture cross-diffusive effects between the different species correctly, we make use of the Maxwell--Stefan theory in a thermodynamically consistent way. For inviscid flow the model turns out to be a nonlinear system of hyperbolic balance laws. We show that the dissipative structure of the Maxwell-Stefan operator permits to guarantee the existence of global classical solutions for initial data close to equilibria. Furthermore it is proven by relative entropy techniques…
In this article, a suite of physically inconsistent properties of the Navier-Stokes equations, associated with the lack of mass diffusion and the definition of velocity, are presented. We show that these inconsistencies are consequences of the Lagrangian derivation that models viscous stresses rather than diffusion. A new model for compressible and diffusive (viscous and heat conducting) flows of an ideal gas, is derived in a purely Eulerian framework. We propose that these equations supersede the Navier-Stokes equations. A few numerical experiments demonstrate some differences and similaritie…
We develop a high-fidelity numerical solver for the compressible Navier-Stokes equations, with the main aim of highlighting the predictive capabilities of low-diffusive numerics for flows in complex geometries. The space discretization of the convective terms in the Navier-Stokes equations relies on a robust energy-preserving numerical flux, and numerical diffusion inherited from the AUSM scheme is added limited to the vicinity of shock waves, or wherever spurious numerical oscillations are sensed. The solver is capable of conserving the total kinetic energy in the inviscid limit, and it bears…
We study analytically the joint dispersion of Gaussian patches of salt and colloids in linear flows, and how salt gradients accelerate or delay colloid spreading by diffusiophoretic effects. Because these flows have constant gradients in space, the problem can be solved almost entirely for any set of parameters, leading to predictions of how the mixing time and the Batchelor scale are modified by diffusiophoresis. We observe that the evolution of global concentrations, defined as the inverse of the patches areas, are very similar to those obtained experimentally in chaotic advection. They are …
We use the recent frame-indifferent theory of diffusive momentum transport to identify internal barriers in wall-bounded turbulence. Formed by the invariant manifolds of the Laplacian of the velocity field, the barriers block the viscous part of the instantaneous momentum flux in the flow. We employ the level sets of single-trajectory Lagrangian diagnostic tools, the trajectory rotation average and trajectory stretching exponent, to approximate both vortical and internal wall-parallel momentum transport barrier (MTB) interfaces. These interfaces provide frame-indifferent alternatives to classi…
We derive a theory for material surfaces that maximally inhibit the diffusive transport of a dynamically active vector field, such as the linear momentum, the angular momentum or the vorticity, in general fluid flows. These special material surfaces (\emph{Lagrangian active barriers}) provide physics-based, observer-independent boundaries of dynamically active coherent structures. We find that Lagrangian active barriers evolve from invariant surfaces of an associated steady and incompressible \emph{barrier equation}, whose right-hand side is the time-averaged pullback of the viscous stress ter…
We describe a new method for computing coherent Lagrangian vortices in two-dimensional flows according to any of the following approaches: black-hole vortices [Haller & Beron-Vera, 2013], objective Eulerian Coherent Structures (OECSs) [Serra & Haller, 2016], material barriers to diffusive transport [Haller et al., 2018, Haller et al., 2019], and constrained diffusion barriers [Haller et al., 2019]. The method builds on ideas developed previously in [Karrasch et al., 2015], but our implementation alleviates a number of shortcomings and allows for the fully automated detection of such vortices o…
We investigated the effects of Schmidt number on passive scalar transport in forced compressible turbulence. In the inertial-convective range the scalar spectrum followed the k^{-5/3} power law. For Sc >> 1, there appeared a k^{-1} power law in the viscous-convective range, while for Sc << 1, a k^{-17/3} power law was identified in the inertial-diffusive range. The scaling constant for the mixed third-order structure function of velocity-scalar increment grew over Sc, and the effect of compressibility made it smaller than the classical 4/3 value. At small amplitudes, the PDF of scalar fluctuat…
This paper develops a consistent particle method for capturing the highly non-linear behavior of violent free-surface flows, based on an Enhanced Weakly Compressible Moving Particle Semi-implicit (EWC-MPS) method. It pays special attention to the evaluation and improvement of two particle regularization techniques, namely, pairwise particle collision (PC) and particle shifting (PS). To improve the effectiveness of PC in removing noisy pressure field, and volume conservation issue of PS, we propose and evaluate several enhancements to these techniques, including a novel dynamic PC technique, an…
In this work, we study the scale characteristics of the log- and outer-region motions and structures in subsonic and supersonic turbulence. To this end, a series of direct numerical simulations of the compressible turbulent channel flow at medium Reynolds numbers are performed. Based on this database, the streamwise and spanwise length scales of the outer-region motions are investigated by the two-point correlations and the one-dimensional spectra. The energy distribution among the multi-scale structures in the outer region is found to be dominated by the semilocal friction-Reynolds-number eff…
