Extensivity of two-dimensional turbulence

Tran, C. V., Shepherd, T. G. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6631-9968 and Cho, H.-R. (2004) Extensivity of two-dimensional turbulence. Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena, 192 (3-4). pp. 187-195. ISSN 0167-2789 doi: 10.1016/j.physd.2004.01.002

Abstract/Summary

This study is concerned with how the attractor dimension of the two-dimensional Navier–Stokes equations depends on characteristic length scales, including the system integral length scale, the forcing length scale, and the dissipation length scale. Upper bounds on the attractor dimension derived by Constantin, Foias and Temam are analysed. It is shown that the optimal attractor-dimension estimate grows linearly with the domain area (suggestive of extensive chaos), for a sufficiently large domain, if the kinematic viscosity and the amplitude and length scale of the forcing are held fixed. For sufficiently small domain area, a slightly “super-extensive” estimate becomes optimal. In the extensive regime, the attractor-dimension estimate is given by the ratio of the domain area to the square of the dissipation length scale defined, on physical grounds, in terms of the average rate of shear. This dissipation length scale (which is not necessarily the scale at which the energy or enstrophy dissipation takes place) can be identified with the dimension correlation length scale, the square of which is interpreted, according to the concept of extensive chaos, as the area of a subsystem with one degree of freedom. Furthermore, these length scales can be identified with a “minimum length scale” of the flow, which is rigorously deduced from the concept of determining nodes.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/32115
Item Type	Article
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	No Reading authors. Back catalogue items Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > Department of Meteorology
Publisher	Elsevier
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