Scale-dependent intermittency and coherence in turbulence (Q1117790)

The statistics of isotropic homogeneous decaying at moderately large Reynolds number are studied in detail using a Fourier-space band- filtering method on flow fields obtained by direct numerical simulation. Two distinct aspects of the non-Gaussianity of the turbulent field are discussed. The nonzero derivative skewness, related to energy transfer, is shown to be essentially a large-scale property, while intermittency measured by the flatness factor is basically a dissipation range phenomenon. In addition, elongated coherent structures of single velocity components at inertial range scales are shown to align with the velocity component, leading to depletion of the nonlinear interaction. Finally, it is shown that the statistics of the dissipation may be simply related to the statistics of the spatial derivative and small-scale velocity fields.