Determinism and invariant measures for diffusing passive scalars advected by unsteady random shear flows

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the long-term behavior of passive scalars in random shear flows, deriving asymptotic approximations, comparing with existing theories, and demonstrating conditions for deterministic effective diffusivity in broad classes of flows.

Contribution

It extends previous results on Gaussian flows to non-Gaussian flows, providing new asymptotic methods and conditions for effective diffusivity and ergodicity in random shear flows.

Findings

Gaussian flows induce deterministic effective diffusivity

Asymptotic approximations improve existing theories

Random flows can sometimes induce less dispersion

Abstract

Here we study the long time behavior of an advection-diffusion equation with a general time varying (including random) shear flow imposing no-flux boundary conditions on channel walls. We derive the asymptotic approximation of the scalar field at long times by using center manifold theory. We carefully compare it with existing time varying homogenization theory as well as other existing center manifold based studies, and present conditions on the flows under which our new approximations give a substantial improvement to these existing theories. A recent study \cite{ding2020ergodicity} has shown that Gaussian random shear flows induce a deterministic effective diffusivity at long times, and explicitly calculated the invariant measure. Here, with our established asymptotic expansions, we not only concisely demonstrate those prior conclusions for Gaussian random shear flows, but also generalize the conclusions regarding determinism to a much broader class of random (non-Gaussian) shear flows. Such results are important ergodicity-like results in that they assure an experimentalist need only perform a single realization of a random flow to observe the ensemble moment predictions at long time. Monte-Carlo simulations are presented illustrating how the highly random behavior converges to the deterministic limit at long time. Counterintuitively, we present a case demonstrating that the random flow may not induce larger dispersion than its deterministic counterpart, and in turn present rigorous conditions under which a random renewing flow induces a stronger effective diffusivity.