A new view of flow topology and conditional statistics in turbulence

By partitioning a turbulent flow field into relative simple units, the original complex system may be better understood from studying decomposed structures. In this paper, some general principles for identifying geometrical decomposition are discussed. Logically, to make analysis more objective and quantitative, the decomposed units need to be non-arbitrarily defined and space filling. Following this vein, we introduced two topological approaches satisfying these prerequisites and the relevant work is reviewed. For a given scalar variable, dissipation elements are defined as the spatial regions that the gradient trajectories of this scalar can share the same pair of scalar extremums (one maximum and one minimum), whereas for the general vector variables, vector tube segments are the part of vector tubes bounded by adjacent extremums of the magnitude of the given vector. Both structures can be characterized by representative shape parameters: the length scale and the extremum difference. On the basis of direct numerical simulation data, the statistics of the shape parameters have been studied. Physically, those structures reveal the 'nature' topology of turbulence, and thus their characteristic parameters reflect the flow properties. For instance, when the vector tube segment approach is applied to the velocity case, the negative skewness of the velocity derivative can be explained by the asymmetry of the joint probability density function of the shape parameters of streamtube segments. Conditional statistics based on these newly defined structures identify finer flow physics and are believed helpful for modelling improvement. Application examples illustrate that, in principle, these methods can generally be applied to different flow cases under different situations.