Volumetric theory of intermittency in fully developed turbulence

This study introduces a new family of volumetric flatness factors which give a rigorous parametric description of the phenomenon of intermittency in fully developed turbulent flows. These quantities gather information about the most "active" part of a velocity field at each scale $\ell$, and allows one to define a dimension function $p \to D_p$ that recovers intermittency correction to the structure exponents $\zeta_p$ in an explicit way. In particular, the predictions of the Frisch-Parisi multifractal formalism can be recovered in a systematic and rigorous way. Within this framework we identify active regions that carry the most energetic part of a velocity field at a given scale $\ell$. A threshold for what constitutes to be active is defined explicitly. Active regions have proven to be experimentally observable in our previous joint work \cite{Ph-paper}, and shown to capture concentration of the energy cascade as $\ell \to 0$, in \cite{CS2014}. We present several examples of fields which exhibit arbitrary multifractal spectrum within theoretically permitted limitations. At the same time we demonstrate with the use of a probabilistic argument that a random field is expected to produce the classical K41 spectrum in the limit $\ell\to 0$. Intermittent deviations from K41 theory are estimated at any finite scale also. Lastly, we present a detailed information-theoretic analysis of the introduced objects. In particular, we quantify concentration of a given source-field in terms of the volume factors, thresholds, and active regions.