We provide a test for numerical simulations, for several two dimensional incompressible flows, that appear to develop sharp fronts. We show that in order to have a front the velocity has to have uncontrolled velocity growth.
Consider a diffusion-free passive scalar $θ$ being mixed by an incompressible flow $u$ on the torus $\mathbb{T}^d$. Our aim is to study how well this scalar can be mixed under an enstrophy constraint on the advecting velocity field.Our main result shows that the mix-norm ($||θ(t)||_{H^{-1}}$) is bounded below by an exponential function of time. The exponential decay rate we obtain is not universal and depends on the size of the support of the initial data. We also perform numerical simulations and confirm that the numerically observed decay rate scales similarly to the rigorous lower bound, at…
In this paper we study a singularly modified version of the incompressible porous media equation. We investigate the implications for the local well-posedness of the equations by modifying, with a fractional derivative, the constitutive relation between the scalar density and the convecting divergence free velocity vector. Our analysis is motivated by recent work \cite{CCCGW} where it is shown that for the surface quasi-geostrophic equation such a singular modification of the constitutive law for the velocity, quite surprisingly still yields a locally well-posed problem. In contrast, for the s…
We study the problem of the optimal mixing of a passive scalar under the action of an incompressible flow in two space dimensions. The scalar solves the continuity equation with a divergence-free velocity field, which satisfies a bound in the Sobolev space $W^{s,p}$, where $s \geq 0$ and $1\leq p\leq \infty$. The mixing properties are given in terms of a characteristic length scale, called the mixing scale. We consider two notions of mixing scale, one functional, expressed in terms of the homogeneous Sobolev norm $\dot H^{-1}$, the other geometric, related to rearrangements of sets. We study r…
In Ann. Math., 170 (2009), 1417-1436, C. De Lellis and L. Székelyhidi Jr. constructed wild solutions of the incompressible Euler equations using a reformulation of the Euler equations as a differential inclusion together with convex integration. In this article we adapt their construction to the system consisting of adding the transport of a passive scalar to the two-dimensional incompressible Euler equations.
This article addresses a fundamental concern regarding the incompressible approximation of fluid motions, one of the most widely used approximations in fluid mechanics. Common belief is that its accuracy is $O(ε)$ where $ε$ denotes the Mach number. In this article, however, we prove an $O(ε^2)$ accuracy for the incompressible approximation of the isentropic, compressible Euler equations thanks to several decoupling properties. At the initial time, the velocity field and its first time derivative are of $O(1)$ size, but the boundary conditions can be as stringent as the solid-wall type. The fas…
We study anomalous dissipation in hydrodynamic turbulence in the context of passive scalars. Our main result produces an incompressible $C^\infty([0,T)\times \mathbb{T}^d)\cap L^1([0,T]; C^{1-}(\mathbb{T}^d))$ velocity field which explicitly exhibits anomalous dissipation. As a consequence, this example also shows non-uniqueness of solutions to the transport equation with an incompressible $L^1([0,T]; C^{1-}(\mathbb{T}^d))$ drift, which is smooth except at one point in time. We also provide three sufficient conditions for anomalous dissipation provided solutions to the inviscid equation become…
We study the mixing properties of a passive scalar advected by an incompressible flow. We consider a class of cellular flows (more general than the class in [Crippa-Schulze M3AS 2017]) and show that, under the constraint that the palenstrophy is bounded uniformly in time, the mixing scale of the passive scalar cannot decay exponentially.
This work deals with the entropic regularization of the Brenier problem for perfect incompressible fluids introduced by Arnaudon, Cruzeiro, Léonard and Zambrini. We show that as in the original setting, there exists a scalar pressure field which is interpreted as the Lagrange multiplier associated to the incompressibility constraint. The proof goes through a reformulation of the problem in PDE terms.
In this article, we study the homogenization limit of a family of solutions to the incompressible 2D Euler equations in the exterior of a family of $n_k$ disjoint disks with centers $\{z^k_i\}$ and radii $\varepsilon_k$. We assume that the initial velocities $u_0^k$ are smooth, divergence-free, tangent to the boundary and that they vanish at infinity. We allow, but we do not require, $n_k \to \infty$, and we assume $\varepsilon_k \to 0$ as $k\to \infty$. Let $γ^k_i$ be the circulation of $u_0^k$ around the circle $\{|x-z^k_i|=\varepsilon_k\}$. We prove that the homogenization limit retains inf…
We study the mixing properties of a scalar $ρ$ advected by a certain incompressible velocity field $u$ on the two dimensional unit ball, which is a stationary radial solution of the Euler equation. The scalar $ρ$ solves the continuity equation with velocity field $u$ and we can measure the degree of mixedness of~$ρ$ with two different scales commonly used in this setting, namely the geometric and the functional mixing scale. We develop a physical space approach well adapted for the quantitative analysis of the decay in time of the geometric mixing scale, which turns out to be polynomial for a …
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 co…
We consider a class of invariant measures for a passive scalar $f$ driven by an incompressible velocity field $\boldsymbol{u}$, on a $d$-dimensional periodic domain, satisfying $$ \partial_t f + \boldsymbol{u} \cdot \nabla f = 0, \qquad f(0)=f_0. $$ The measures are obtained as limits of stochastic viscous perturbations. We prove that the span of the $H^1$ eigenfunctions of the operator $\boldsymbol{u}\cdot\nabla$ contains the support of these measures. We also analyze several explicit examples: when $\boldsymbol{u}$ is a shear flow or a relaxation enhancing flow (a generalization of weakly mi…
We address the challenge of optimal incompressible stirring to mix an initially inhomogeneous distribution of passive tracers. As a quantitative measure of mixing we adopt the $H^{-1}$ norm of the scalar fluctuation field, equivalent to the (square-root of the) variance of a low-pass filtered image of the tracer concentration field. First we establish that this is a useful gauge even in the absence of molecular diffusion: its vanishing as $t --> \infty$ is evidence of the stirring flow's mixing properties in the sense of ergodic theory. Then we derive absolute limits on the total amount of mix…