Is the Scaling of Supersonic Turbulence Universal?
Abstract
The statistical properties of turbulence are considered to be universal at sufficiently small length scales, i. e., independent of boundary conditions and large-scale forces acting on the fluid. Analyzing data from numerical simulations of supersonic turbulent flow driven by external forcing, we demonstrate that this is not generally true for the two-point velocity statistics of compressible turbulence. However, a reformulation of the refined similarity hypothesis in terms of the mass-weighted velocity rho^(1/3)v yields scaling laws that are almost insensitive to the forcing. The results imply that the most intermittent dissipative structures are shocks closely following the scaling of Burgers turbulence.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.0810.1397,
title = {Is the Scaling of Supersonic Turbulence Universal?},
author = {Wolfram Schmidt and Christoph Federrath and Ralf Klessen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0810.1397},
year = {2008}
}
Comments
4 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication by Phys. Rev. Lett