Influence of initial conditions on compressible vorticity dynamics (Q1313909)

The Navier-Stokes equations for a perfect gas with constant transport coefficients are solved numerically to study the evolution of a single vortex, a prototypical phenomenon of vortex reconnection and two- dimensional turbulence. Special emphasis is placed on the effect of the initial conditions on these solutions. To this end, two choices of initial conditions used previously in numerical simulations of complex vortex dynamics e.g. (i) uniform pressure and density (CIC) and (ii) uniform density with the pressure determined from the Poisson equation (CDIC) are compared with a new proposal (iii) termed polytropic initial condition (PIC). In this latter case the Poisson equation is solved for initially polytropically related pressure and density fields. The results indicate that both CIC and CDIC are inappropriate for compressible vortex studies. Specifically, CIC is found to cause strong acoustic transients due to an initially unbalanced centrifugal force in the vortex core, while CDIC leads to the artificial situation of almost incompressible results for the cases considered in the paper. In contrast PIC is shown to be consistent with low Mach number theory and to lead to solutions without strong acoustic transients.