Triad-angle locking in low-order models of the 2D Navier-Stokes equations (Q1819627)

In recent years, Franceschini and his colleagues [e.g. \textit{V. Franceschini}, Phys. Fluids 26, 433-447 (1983; Zbl 0523.76021)] have explored the detailed trajectory behavior of several low-order truncated models of the two-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations. Their models, however, involve only the real amplitude modes and the excitation is through the third mode only. To simulate the 2D flow more accurately, we examined a sequence of low-order models which have complex amplitude- modes as dictated by the Navier-Stokes equations. A surprise was that the complex-mode models have a special equilibrium state for triad-angle sums being locked to \(\pm \pi /2\), \(\pm 3\pi /2,...\). The upshot is then the manifold of complex-mode models collapses to a half-sized manifold of the corresponding real-mode models. We have traced this to the single-mode excitation, hence the triad-angle locking can be avoided by forcing several modes.