Turbulence Structure and Vortex Dynamics

The modern understanding of turbulence is that it is a collection of weakly correlated vortical motions, which, despite their intermittent and chaotic distribution over a wide range of space and time scales, actually consist of local characteristic 'eddy' patterns that persist as they move around under the influences of their own and other eddies' vorticity fields. Numerical simulations and experimental observations have now identified some forms and elements of 'life-cycles' of some of these structures. The articles in this volume, first published in 2000, examine a number of key questions that have engaged turbulence researchers for many years. Most involve mathematical analysis, but some describe numerical simulations and experimental results that focus on these questions. However, all are addressed to a wide cross-section of the turbulence community, namely mathematicians, engineers and scientists.

Table of Contents:
Introduction; 1. Motion and expansion of a viscous vortex ring: elliptical slowing down and diffusive expansion Yasuhide Fukumoto and H. K. Moffatt; 2. Stretching and compression of vorticity in the 3D Euler equations J. D. Gibbon, B. Galanti and R. M. Kerr; 3. Structure of a new family of vortices of stretched non-axisymmetric vortices Stéphane le Dizès; 4. Core dynamics of a coherent structure: a prototypical physical-space cascade mechanism? Dhoorjaty S. Pradeep and Fazle Hussain; 5. Fundamental instabilities in spatially-developing wing wakes and temporally-developing vortex pairs C. H. K. Williamson, T. Leweke and G. D. Miller; 6. Vortex lines and vortex triangles in superfluid helium Carlo F. Barenghi; 7. Evolution of localized packets of vorticity and scalar in turbulence A. Leonard; 8. Vortical structure and modelling of turbulence E. A. Novikov; 9. The issue of local isotropy of velocity and scalar turbulent fields Z. Warhaft; 10. Near-singular flow structure: dissipation and eduction J. C. Vassilicos; 11. Vortex stretching versus production of strain/dissipation Arkaday Tsinober; 12. Dynamics and statistics of vortical eddies in turbulence J. C. R. Hunt; 13. Stability of vortex structures in a rotating frame Claude Cambon; 14. LES and vortex topology in shear and rotating flows Marcel Lesieur, Pierre Comte and Olivier Métais; 15. Conditional mode elimination with asymptotic freedom for isotropic turbulence at large Reynolds numbers David McComb and Craig Johnston.

Review :
" The production of the book is up to the high standards we customarily expect of Cambridge University Press. The uniform layout of the papers stands in contrast to that of many similar collections. The Isaac Newton Institute, the organizers of the program on turbulence, the editors of this volume, the contributors, and the publisher all deserve our gradtitude for providing the setting for the presentation of this work and for so rapidly and attrctively disseminating it to the research community." AIAA Jrnl "There is no shortage of intellectual stimulation." SIAM Review "...recommended to a wide audience of mathematicians, engineers and scientists interested in gaining an understanding of turbulence, since it is a high-level state-of-the-art presentation of one of the intensively developing key directions of research in this field." Mathematical Reviews