Anisotropic homogeneous turbulence: hierarchy and intermittency of scaling exponents in the anisotropic sectors

Phys Rev Lett. 2001 May 21;86(21):4831-4. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.86.4831.

Abstract

We present the first measurements of anisotropic statistical fluctuations in perfectly homogeneous turbulent flows. We address both problems of intermittency in anisotropic sectors and hierarchical ordering of anisotropies on a direct numerical simulation of a three dimensional random Kolmogorov flow. We achieved an homogeneous and anisotropic statistical ensemble by randomly shifting the forcing phases. We observe high intermittency as a function of the order of the velocity correlation within each fixed anisotropic sector and a hierarchical organization of scaling exponents at fixed order of the velocity correlation at changing the anisotropic sector.