The joint cascade of energy and helicity in three-dimensional turbulence
By Qiaoning Chen, Shiyi Chen, Gregory L. Eyink Department of Mechanical Engineering, T. J. H. University, Center for Nonlinear Studies, T. Division, L. Laboratory, National Research, P. University, D. O. Mathematics and 1 more. 2002
232 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Three-dimensional (3D) turbulence has both energy and helicity as inviscid constants of motion. In contrast to two-dimensional (2D) turbulence, where a second inviscid invariant—the enstrophy—blocks the energy cascade to small scales, in 3D there is a joint cascade of both energy and helicity simultaneously to small scales. It has long been recognized that the crucial difference between 2D and 3D is that enstrophy is a nonnegative quantity whereas the helicity can have either sign. The basic cancellation mechanism which permits a joint cascade of energy and helicity is illuminated by means of the helical decomposition of the velocity into positively and negatively polarized waves. This decomposition is employed in the present study both theoretically and also in a numerical simulation of homogeneous and isotropic 3D turbulence. It is shown that the transfer of energy to small scales produces a tremendous growth of helicity separately in the + and − helical modes at high wave numbers, diverging in the limi...
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Computational Mechanics, Oceanography
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6bfdb413c542d7480877f92be7bad7f5ab953a38
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Astronomy and Astrophysics
- D. O. Astronomy
- John A. Center
- Luca Biferale
- Bruce G. Elmegreen
- A. Alexakis
- U. Texas
- Christoph Federrath
- Ralf Klessen
In Computational Mechanics
In Oceanography
Citations in the corpus
- Interstellar Turbulence I: Observations and Processes (2004, background): “The number of degrees of freedom for 3D incompressible turbulence scales like Re9/4, meaning that a simulation at Re = 106 would require a resolution of 105 zones per dimension, far beyond the reach of present-day approaches (but see the lattice Boltzmann method of Chen et al. 2003).”
- Cascades and transitions in turbulent flows (2018, background): “Translating back to Fourier space we get for the semi-sum (mirror-symmetric) and the semi-difference (mirror-antisymmetric) of the spectral components [9]:”