From air-sea gas exchange, oil pollution, to bioreactors, the ubiquitous fragmentation of bubbles/drops in turbulence has been modelled by relying on the classical Kolmogorov-Hinze paradigm since the 1950s. This framework hypothesizes that bubbles/drops are broken solely by eddies of the same size, even though turbulence is well known for its wide spectrum of scales. Here, by designing an experiment that can physically and cleanly disentangle eddies of various sizes, we report the experimental evidence to challenge this hypothesis and show bubbles are preferentially broken by the sub-bubble-scale eddies. Our work also highlights that fragmentation cannot be quantified solely by the stress criterion or the Weber number; The competition between different time scales is equally important. Instead of being elongated slowly and persistently by flows at their own scales, bubbles are fragmented in turbulence by small eddies via a burst of intense local deformation within a short time.
The self-similar Richardson cascade admits two logically possible scenarios of small-scale turbulence at high Reynolds numbers. In the first scenario, eddies' population densities vary as a function of eddies' scales. As a result, one or a few eddy types dominate at small scales, and small-scale turbulence lacks diversity. In the second scenario, eddies' population densities are scale-invariant across the inertial range, resulting in small-scale diversity. That is, there are as many types of eddies at the small scales as at the large scales. In this letter, we measure eddies' population densit…
Turbulent flows in the presence of walls may be apprehended as a collection of momentum- and energy-containing eddies (energy-eddies), whose sizes differ by many orders of magnitude. These eddies follow a self-sustaining cycle, i.e., existing eddies are seeds for the inception of new ones, and so forth. Understanding this process is critical for the modelling and control of geophysical and industrial flows, in which a non-negligible fraction of the energy is dissipated by turbulence in the immediate vicinity of walls. In this study, we examine the causal interactions of energy-eddies in wall-b…
The principle of permanence of large eddies is one of the central pillars onto which our understanding of decaying homogeneous turbulence is built. The validity conditions of this principle have been thoroughly discussed for constant density flows, but not for variable-density ones. In this work, we show that density non-uniformities modify the remote action of the pressure field. It results into distant velocity correlations being submitted to a stronger non-linear transfer of energy. A simple example is proposed to illustrate this property and a spectral analysis of non-linear transfer terms…
Drop deformation in fluid flows is investigated here as an exchange between the kinetic energy of the fluid and the surface energy of the drop. We show analytically that this energetic exchange is controlled only by the stretching (or compression) of the drop surface by the rate-of-strain tensor. This mechanism is analogous to the stretching of the vorticity field in turbulence. Leveraging the non-local nature of turbulence dynamics, we introduce a new decomposition that isolates the energetic exchange due to local drop-induced surface effects, from the non-local action of turbulent fluctuatio…
The interplay between waves and eddies in stably stratified rotating flows is investigated by means of world-class direct numerical simulations using up to $3072^3$ grid points. Strikingly, we find that the shift from vortex to wave dominated dynamics occurs at a wavenumber $k_R$ which does not depend on Reynolds number, suggesting that partition of energy between wave and vortical modes is not sensitive to the development of turbulence at the smaller scales. We also show that $k_R$ is comparable to the wavenumber at which exchanges between kinetic and potential modes stabilize at close to equ…
Since the introduction of the logarithmic law of the wall more than 80 years ago, the equation for the mean velocity profile in turbulent boundary layers has been widely applied to model near-surface processes and parameterise surface drag. Yet the hypothetical turbulent eddies proposed in the original logarithmic law derivation and mixing length theory of Prandtl have never been conclusively linked to physical features in the flow. Here, we present evidence that suggests these eddies correspond to regions of coherent streamwise momentum known as uniform momentum zones (UMZs). The arrangement …
Two-dimensional (2-D) spectra of the streamwise velocity component, measured at friction Reynolds numbers ranging from 2400 to 26000, are used to refine a model for the logarithmic region of turbulent boundary layers. Here, we focus on the attached eddy model (AEM). The conventional AEM assumes the boundary layer to be populated with hierarchies of self-similar wall-attached ($Type\,A$) eddies alone. While $Type\,A$ eddies represent the dominant energetic large-scale motions at high Reynolds numbers, the scales that are not represented by such eddies are observed to carry a significant proport…
In turbulence, for neutral or conducting fluids, a large ratio of scales is excited because of the possible occurrence of inverse cascades to large, global scales together with direct cascades to small, dissipative scales, as observed in the atmosphere and oceans, or in the solar environment. In this context, using direct numerical simulations with forcing, we analyze scale dynamics in the presence of magnetic fields with a generalized Ohm's law including a Hall current. The ion inertial length epsilon_H serves as the control parameter at fixed Reynolds number. Both the magnetic and generalize…
We study the growth of small fluctuations of magnetic field in supersonic turbulence, the small-scale dynamo. The growth is due to the fastest turbulent eddies above the resistive scale. We observe that for supersonic turbulence these eddies are effectively incompressible which creates a robust structure of the growth. The eddies are localised below the sonic scale $l_s$ defined as the scale where the typical velocity of the turbulent eddies equals the speed of sound. Thus the flow below $l_s$ is effectively incompressible and the field growth proceeds as in incompressible flow. At large Mach …
The mean rate of energy dissipation in turbulence is traditionally assumed to scale with parameters of the energy-containing large scales, i.e., the root-mean-square fluctuation of the longitudinal velocity u and its correlation length L(u). However, the resultant scaling coefficient C(u) is known to depend on the large-scale configuration of the flow. We define the correlation length L(u2) of the local energy u2, study the scaling coefficient C(u2) with experimental data of several flows, and find a possibility that C(u2) does not depend on the flow configuration. Not L(u) but rather L(u2) co…
The vertical distribution of suspended sediment concentration (SSC) remains a subject of active research given its relevance to a plethora of problems in hydraulics, hydrology, ecology, and water quality control. Much of the classical theories developed over the course of 90 years represent the effects of turbulence on suspended sediments (SS) using an effective mixing length or eddy diffusivity without explicitly accounting for the energetics of turbulent eddies across scales. To address this gap, the turbulent flux of sediments is derived using a co-spectral budget (CSB) model that can be im…
The observability of the flow field away from the wall in turbulent channel flow is studied using only wall observations. Reconstructions are generated from noiseless but limited wall data using linear stochastic estimation, with emphasis on the quality of the reconstruction. All the velocities are well reconstructed in the buffer layer, but only relatively large "wall-attached" eddies are observable farther from the wall. In particular, the large structures accounting for approximately 40% of the total kinetic energy and of the tangential Reynolds stress are captured accurately. It is argued …
Jin (Phys. Fluids, vol. 31, 2019, p. 125102) proposed a new turbulence simulation method which shows better performance than other classic turbulence models. It is composed of a small-eddy-dissipation mixing length (SED-ML) model for calculating the reference solution and a parameter extension method for correcting the solution. The mechanism of this method is more deeply analyzed in this study to find out how to develop a turbulence model with a high accuracy and a low computational cost. The turbulent channel flows with Re_tau=821 and 2003 and decaying homogenous and isotropic turbulence are…
A non-local cascade model for anisotropic MHD turbulence in the presence of a guiding magnetic field is proposed. The model takes into account that (a) energy cascades in an anisotropic manner and as a result a different estimate for the cascade rate in the direction parallel and perpendicular to the guiding field is made. (b) the interactions that result in the cascade are between different scales. Eddies with wave numbers $k_\|$ and $k_\perp$ interact with eddies with wave numbers $q_\|,q_\perp$ such that a resonance condition between the wave numbers $q_\|,q_\perp$ and $k_\|,k_\perp$ holds.…
Single-particle dispersion in the Bolgiano--Obukhov regime of two-dimensional turbulent convection is investigated. Unlike dispersion in a flow displaying the classical K41 phenomenology, here, the leading contribution to the Lagrangian velocity fluctuations is given by the largest eddies. This implies a linear behavior in time for a typical velocity fluctuation in the time interval $t$. The contribution to the Lagrangian velocity fluctuations of local eddies (i.e. with a characteristic time of order $t$), whose space/time scalings are ruled by the Bolgiano--Obukhov theory, is thus not detecta…
Kolmogorov's theory for turbulence in 1941 is based on a hypothesis that small-scale statistics are uniquely determined by the kinematic viscosity and the mean rate of energy dissipation. Landau remarked that the local rate of energy dissipation should fluctuate in space over large scales and hence should affect small-scale statistics. Experimentally, we confirm the significance of this large-scale fluctuation, which is comparable to the mean rate of energy dissipation at the typical scale for energy-containing eddies. The significance is independent of the Reynolds number and the configuratio…
Experiments and numerical simulations show that quantum turbulence exists in two distinct limiting regimes: Kolmogorov turbulence (which shares with classical turbulence the important property of a cascade of kinetic energy from large eddies to small eddies) and Vinen turbulence (which is more similar to a random flow). In this work, we define a mesoscale helicity for the superfluid, which, tested in numerical experiments, distinguishes the two turbulent regimes, quantifying the amount of nonlocal vortex interactions and the orientation of the vortex lines.
Turbulence is defined as an eddy-like state of fluid motion where the inertial-vortex forces of the eddies are larger than all the other forces that tend to damp the eddies out. Fossil turbulence is a perturbation produced by turbulence that persists after the fluid ceases to be turbulent at the scale of the perturbation. Because vorticity is produced at small scales, turbulence must cascade from small scales to large, providing a consistent physical basis for Kolmogorovian universal similarity laws. Oceanic and astrophysical mixing and diffusion are dominated by fossil turbulence and fossil t…
This article discusses the description of wall-bounded turbulence as a deterministic high-dimensional dynamical system of interacting coherent structures, defined as eddies with enough internal dynamics to behave relatively autonomously from any remaining incoherent part of the flow. The guiding principle is that randomness is not a property, but a methodological choice of what to ignore in the flow, and that a complete understanding of turbulence, including the possibility of control, requires that it be kept to a minimum. After briefly reviewing the underlying low-order statistics of flows a…
Turbulence is defined as an eddy-like state of fluid motion where the inertial-vortex forces of the eddies are larger than any other forces that tend to damp the eddies out. By this definition, turbulence always cascades from small scales (where the vorticity is created) to larger scales (where other forces dominate and the turbulence fossilizes). Fossil turbulence is any perturbation in a hydrophysical field produced by turbulence that persists after the fluid is no longer turbulent at the scale of the perturbation. Fossil turbulence patterns and fossil turbulence waves preserve and propagate…
The bubble size distribution below a breaking wave is of paramount interest when quantifying mass exchanges between the atmosphere and oceans. Mass fluxes at the interface are driven by bubbles that are small compared to the Hinze scale $d_h$, the critical size below which bubbles are stable, even though individually these are negligible in volume. Combining experimental and numerical approaches, we report a power law scaling 3/2 of the diameter of small bubble size distribution, for sufficiently large separation of scales between the injection size and the Hinze scale. From an analysis of ind…
Using a one-layer QG model, we study the effect of random monoscale topography on forced beta-plane turbulence. The forcing is a uniform steady wind stress that produces both a uniform large-scale zonal flow $U(t)$ and smaller-scale macroturbulence (both standing and transient eddies). The flow $U(t)$ is retarded by Ekman drag and by the domain-averaged topographic form stress produced by the eddies. The topographic form stress typically balances most of the applied wind stress, while the Ekman drag provides all of the energy dissipation required to balance the wind work. A collection of stati…
We reformulate the problem of hydrodynamic turbulence as a heat flow problem. We obtain thus a prediction $$ ζ_p={p\over3}-{1\over\lnκ}\lnΓ({p\over3}+1) $$ for the exponents of the structure functions ($<|Δ_rv|^p>=r^{ζ_p}$). The meaning of the adjustable parameter $κ$ is that when an eddy of size $r$ has decayed to eddies of size $r/κ$ their energies have a thermal distribution. The above formula, with $(\lnκ)^{-1}=.32\pm.01$ is compatible with experimental data. This agreement lends supports to our physically motivated picture of turbulence.
The fragmentation of small, brittle, flexible, inextensible fibers is investigated in a fully-developed, homogeneous, isotropic turbulent flow. Such small fibers spend most of their time fully stretched and their dynamics follows that of stiff rods. They can then break through tensile failure, i.e. when the tension is higher than a given threshold. Fibers bend when experiencing a strong compression. During these rare and intermittent buckling events, they can break under flexural failure, i.e. when the curvature exceeds a threshold. Fine-scale massive simulations of both the fluid flow and the…
To understand the earliest stages of planet formation, it is crucial to be able to predict the rate and the outcome of dust grains collisions, be it sticking and growth, bouncing, or fragmentation. The outcome of such collisions depends on the collision speed, so we need a solid understanding of the rate and velocity distribution of turbulence-induced dust grain collisions. The rate of the collisions depends both on the speed of the collisions and the degree of clustering experienced by the dust grains, which is a known outcome of turbulence. We evolve the motion of dust grains in simulated tu…
We propose a phenomenological model for incompressible magnetohydrodynamic turbulence. We argue that nonlinear-wave interaction weakens as the energy cascade proceeds to small scales, however, the anisotropy of fluctuations along the large-scale magnetic field increases, which makes turbulence strong at all scales. To explain the weakening of the interaction, we propose that small-scale fluctuations of the velocity and magnetic fields become increasingly dynamically aligned as their scale decreases, so that turbulent eddies become locally anisotropic in the plane perpendicular to the large-sca…
The 4/5-law of turbulence, which characterizes the energy cascade from large to small-sized eddies at high Reynolds numbers in classical fluids, is verified experimentally in a superfluid 4He wind tunnel, operated down to 1.56 K and up to R_lambda ~ 1640. The result is corroborated by high-resolution simulations of Landau-Tisza's two-fluid model down to 1.15 K, corresponding to a residual normal fluid concentration below 3 % but with a lower Reynolds number of order R_lambda ~ 100. Although the Kármán-Howarth equation (including a viscous term) is not valid \emph{a priori} in a superfluid, it …
