Linearly Forces Isotropic Turbulence

Abstract

Stationary isotropic turbulence is often studied numerically by adding a forcing term to the Navier-Stokes equation. This is usually done for the purpose of achieving higher Reynolds number and longer statistics than is possible for isotropic decaying turbulence. It is generally accepted that forcing the Navier-Stokes equation at low wave number does not influence the small scale statistics of the flow provided that there is wide separation between the largest and smallest scales. It will be shown, however, that the spectral width of the forcing has a noticeable effect on inertial range statistics. A case will be made here for using a broader form of forcing in order to compare computed isotropic stationary turbulence with (decaying) grid turbulence. It is shown that using a forcing function which is directly proportional to the velocity has physical meaning and gives results which are closer to both homogeneous and non-homogeneous turbulence. Section 1 presents a four part series of motivations for linear forcing. Section 2 puts linear forcing to a numerical test with a pseudospectral computation.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Dec 01, 2003
Accession Number
ADP014826

Entities

People

  • T. S. Lundgren

Organizations

  • University of Minnesota

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Asymptotic Series
  • Coefficients
  • Computational Science
  • Computations
  • Energy Production
  • Equations
  • Filters
  • Fluid Mechanics
  • High Resolution
  • Navier Stokes Equations
  • Production
  • Reynolds Number
  • Scaling Laws
  • Stationary
  • Statistics
  • Stratified Fluids
  • Turbulence

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)
  • Plasma Physics / Magnetohydrodynamics
  • Statistical inference.