Scaling Laws and Intermittency in Highly Compressible Turbulence

TL;DR

This study uses large-scale simulations to explore the physics of highly compressible turbulence, revealing deviations from classical laws and proposing a modified phenomenology that accounts for compressibility effects.

Contribution

It introduces an extension of Kolmogorov's K41 theory for compressible turbulence, incorporating density effects and demonstrating invariance of certain statistics across Mach numbers.

Findings

Velocity spectrum slope of -1.69 at Mach 6

Density-weighted velocity 'v' maintains K41 scaling

Fractal dimension of density distribution D_m=2.4

Abstract

We use large-scale three-dimensional simulations of supersonic Euler turbulence to study the physics of a highly compressible cascade. Our numerical experiments describe non-magnetized driven turbulent flows with an isothermal equation of state and an rms Mach number of 6. We find that the inertial range velocity scaling deviates strongly from the incompressible Kolmogorov laws. We propose an extension of Kolmogorov's K41 phenomenology that takes into account compressibility by mixing the velocity and density statistics and preserves the K41 scaling of the density-weighted velocity v=rho^{1/3}u. We show that low-order statistics of 'v' are invariant with respect to changes in the Mach number. For instance, at Mach 6 the slope of the power spectrum of 'v' is -1.69 and the third-order structure function of 'v' scales linearly with separation. We directly measure the mass dimension of the "fractal" density distribution in the inertial subrange, D_m=2.4, which is similar to the observed fractal dimension of molecular clouds and agrees well with the cascade phenomenology.