English

Measuring the effect of spatial dimension on hydrodynamic turbulence using direct numerical simulation

Fluid Dynamics 2025-12-02 v1 High Energy Physics - Theory Chaotic Dynamics

Abstract

We perform direct numerical simulation of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equation with forcing at different spatial dimensions and measure turbulent and chaotic properties. Lyapunov exponents, λ\lambda, decrease with dimension, and λ<0\lambda < 0 for all simulations in six-dimensions up to Re=40Re = 40. These six-dimensional simulations display non-Gaussian statistics and other behavior similar to well developed turbulence despite their lack of chaos. Further, we find that small scale perturbations do not extend to the largest scales and that this terminal scale between correlation and decorrelation shrinks with dimension. We theorize that this change is related to the increased rate of vortex stretching. We find the interplay between turbulent and chaotic properties changes with increasing dimension.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.00449,
  title  = {Measuring the effect of spatial dimension on hydrodynamic turbulence using direct numerical simulation},
  author = {Richard D. J. G. Ho and Daniel Clark and Andres Armua and Xichao Yang and Daniel J. Brener and Arjun Berera},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.00449},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

6 pages, 5 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:00:47.464Z