Energy Cascade: Difference between revisions

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In a fully turbulent flow, at high Re, we have large eddies breaking up into smaller ones, and those break up as well until �finally the eddies are so small that they are dissipated by viscosity. Clearly the scale at which dissipation occurs depends on the viscosity. A poem by Lewis Fry Richardson:
In a fully turbulent flow, at high Re, we have large eddies breaking up into smaller ones, and those break up as well until �finally the eddies are so small that they are dissipated by viscosity. Clearly the scale at which dissipation occurs depends on the viscosity. A poem by Lewis Fry Richardson:


Big whirls have little whirls,
Big whirls have little whirls,

Revision as of 11:47, 21 May 2015

In a fully turbulent flow, at high Re, we have large eddies breaking up into smaller ones, and those break up as well until �finally the eddies are so small that they are dissipated by viscosity. Clearly the scale at which dissipation occurs depends on the viscosity. A poem by Lewis Fry Richardson:


Big whirls have little whirls,

Which feed on their velocity,

And little whirls have lesser whirls,

and so on to viscosity.


See Kolmogorov's 5/3 law for the energy in terms of wavenumber in the inertial subrange of wavenumbers before dissipation occurs.