Passive Scalar Structures in Supersonic Turbulence
Fluid Dynamics
2015-05-27 v1 Astrophysics of Galaxies
Abstract
We conduct a systematic numerical study of passive scalar structures in supersonic turbulent flows. We find that the degree of intermittency in the scalar structures increases only slightly as the flow changes from transonic to highly supersonic, while the velocity structures become significantly more intermittent. This difference is due to the absence of shock-like discontinuities in the scalar field. The structure functions of the scalar field are well described by the intermittency model of She and L\'{e}v\^{e}que [Phys. Rev. Lett. 72, 336 (1994)], and the most intense scalar structures are found to be sheet-like at all Mach numbers.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1103.5489,
title = {Passive Scalar Structures in Supersonic Turbulence},
author = {Liubin Pan and Evan Scannapieco},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1103.5489},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
4 pages, 3 figures, to appear in PRE