Related papers: Studying edge geometry in transiently turbulent sh…
Turbulent-laminar intermittency, typically in the form of bands and spots, is a ubiquitous feature of the route to turbulence in wall-bounded shear flows. Here we study the idealised shear between stress-free boundaries driven by a…
Linearly stable shear flows first transition to turbulence in the form of localised patches. At low Reynolds numbers, these turbulent patches tend to suddenly decay, following a memoryless process typical of rare events. How far in advance…
We investigate the nonlinear dynamics of turbulent shear flows, with and without rotation, in the context of a simple but physically motivated closure of the equation governing the evolution of the Reynolds stress tensor. We show that the…
The proliferation of turbulence in subcritical wall-bounded shear flows involves spatially localised coherent structures. Turbulent spots correspond to finite-time nonlinear responses to pointwise disturbances and are regarded as seeds of…
Taylor-Couette (TC) flow is used to probe the hydrodynamical stability of astrophysical accretion disks. Experimental data on the subcritical stability of TC are in conflict about the existence of turbulence (cf. Ji et al. Nature, 444,…
The effects of global flow rotation and curvature on the subcritical transition to turbulence in shear flows are examined. The relevant time-scales of the problem are identified by a decomposition of the flow into a laminar and a deviation…
Dissipative dynamical systems characterised by two basins of attraction are found in many physical systems, notably in hydrodynamics where laminar and turbulent regimes can coexist. The state space of such systems is structured around a…
Pipe flow is a canonical example where turbulence first appears intermittently in space and time, taking the form of localized structures termed puffs. Turbulence spreads via puff self-replication, which must out-compete puff decays to…
Turbulence, left unforced, decays and invades the surrounding quiescent fluid. Though ubiquitous, this simple phenomenon has proven hard to capture within a simple and general framework. Experiments in conventional turbulent flow chambers…
In plane Couette flow, the incompressible fluid between two plane parallel walls is driven by the motion of those walls. The laminar solution, in which the streamwise velocity varies linearly in the wall-normal direction, is known to be…
According to a recent theory \cite{Li14}, when the Reynolds number is large, fully developed turbulence is caused by short term unpredictability (rough dependence upon initial data); when the Reynolds number is moderate, often transient…
This article aims to make a detailed analysis of co-flowing plane Couette flows. Particularly, the variation of flow quantities from the turbulent to non-turbulent region is studied. While the enstrophy exhibits a sharp jump, the other…
We investigate a theoretical framework for modeling fluid turbulence based on the formalism of exact coherent structures (ECSs). Although highly promising, existing evidence for the role of ECSs in turbulent flows is largely circumstantial…
In this paper we analyze the transport of passive tracers by deterministic stationary incompressible flows which can be decomposed over an infinite number of spatial scales without separation between them. It appears that a low order…
Many transitional wall-bounded shear flows are characterised by the coexistence in state-space of laminar and turbulent regimes. Probing the edge boundary between the two attractors has led in the last decade to the numerical discovery of…
A theoretical analysis is presented for turbulent flows, applicable for canonical (channel, boundary-layer and free jet) geometries. Momentum and energy balance for a control volume moving at the local mean velocity decouples the…
The purpose of this contribution is to summarize and discuss recent advances regarding the onset of turbulence in shear flows. The absence of a clear cut instability mechanism, the spatio-temporal intermittent character and extremely long…
Recent research has shed light on the role of coherent structures in forming layers when stably stratified turbulence is forced with horizontal shear (Lucas, Caulfield & Kerswell, J. Fluid Mech., vol. 832, 2017, pp. 409-437). Here we extend…
This paper is a personal overview of the efforts over the last half century to understand fluid turbulence in terms of simpler coherent units. The consequences of chaos and the concept of coherence are first reviewed, using examples from…
It is shown, using direct numerical simulations and laboratory experiments data, that distributed chaos is often tuned to large scale coherent motions in anisotropic inhomogeneous turbulence. The examples considered are: fully developed…