# Kinetic and internal energy transfer in implicit large eddy simulations of forced compressible turbulence

## TL;DR

This study investigates energy transfer mechanisms in compressible turbulence using simulations with cooling, revealing how Mach number influences energy flux components and scaling behaviors.

## Contribution

It introduces a simulation approach with cooling to analyze energy transfer across Mach numbers, highlighting the impact of forcing modes and identifying regimes dominated by advection.

## Key findings

- Energy transfer rates vary with Mach number and forcing composition.
- High Mach number turbulence exhibits advection-dominated energy transfer.
- Scaling exponents align with Burgers and Kolmogorov theories depending on variables.

## Abstract

We revisit the problem of how energy transfer through the turbulent cascade operates in compressible hydrodynamic turbulence. In general, there is no conservative compressible cascade since the kinetic and internal energy reservoirs can exchange energy through pressure dilatation. Moreover, statistically stationary turbulence at high Mach number can only be maintained in nearly isothermal gas, i.e., if excess heat produced by shock compression and kinetic energy dissipation is continuously removed from the system. We mimic this process by a linear cooling term in numerical simulations of turbulence driven by stochastic forcing. This allows us to investigate turbulence statistics for a broad range of Mach numbers. We compute the rate of change of kinetic and internal energy in wavenumber shells caused by advective, compressive, and pressure dilatation effects and constrain power-law fits to compressible turbulence energy spectra to a range of wavenumbers in which the total energy transfer is close to zero. The resulting scaling exponents are significantly affected by the forcing. Depending on the root mean square Mach number, we find a nearly constant advective component of the cross-scale flux of kinetic energy at intermediate wavenumbers for particular mixtures of solenoidal and compressive modes in the forcing. This suggests the existence of a natural, Mach number dependent mixture of forcing modes. Our findings also support an advection-dominated regime at high Mach numbers with specific scaling exponents (Burgers scaling for the pure velocity fluctuation $u$ and Kolmogorov scaling for the mass-weighted variable $v=\rho^{1/3}u$).