Multi-scale energy budget of inertially driven turbulence in normal and superfluid helium

TL;DR

This study investigates inertially driven turbulence in liquid helium, comparing normal and superfluid phases, and analyzes energy transfer across scales using advanced particle tracking techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a novel experimental approach to measure energy budgets in turbulence within superfluid helium, bridging the gap between classical and quantum turbulence studies.

Findings

Energy estimates are consistent across phases and scales.

Small scale measurements are affected by noise and flow dimensionality.

Results align with classical turbulence experiments in normal fluids.

Abstract

In this paper we present a novel hydrodynamic experiment using liquid $^4$He. The flow is forced inertially by a canonical oscillating grid using either its normal (He~I) or superfluid (He~II) phase, generating a statistically stationary turbulence. We characterise the turbulent properties of the flow using 2D Lagrangian Particle tracking on hollow glass micro-spheres. As expected for tracer particles, the Vorono\"{i} tessellation on particle positions does not show a significant departure from a random Poisson process neither in He~I nor He~II phase. Particles' positions are tracked with high temporal resolution, allowing to resolve velocity fluctuations at integral and inertial scales while properly assessing the noise contribution. Additionally, we differentiate the particles' positions (by convolution with Gaussian kernels) in order to access small scale quantities like acceleration. Using these measured quantities and the formalism of classical Homogeneous Isotropic Turbulence (HIT) to perform an energy budget across scales we extract the energy injection rate at the large scale, the energy flux cascading through inertial scales, down to small scales at which it is dissipated. We found that in such inertially driven turbulence, regardless of the normal or superfluid state of the fluid, estimates of energy at the different scales are compatible with each other and consistent with oscillating grid turbulence results reported for normal fluids in the literature. The largest discrepancy shows up at small scales where the signal to noise ratio is harder to control and where the 2D measurement is contaminated by the 3D nature of the flow. This motivates to focus future experimental projects towards small scales, low noise and 3D measurements.