Local near-Beltrami structure and depletion of the nonlinearity in the 3D Navier-Stokes flows (Q2423397)

It is known that computational simulations of turbulent flows indicate that regions of low dissipation/enstrophy production represent a locally near-Beltrami flow. This means a high degree of local alignment between the velocity and the vorticity. Hence one could imagine a situation in which the persistence of the local near-Beltrami property might be consistent with a (possible) finite-time singularity formation. In this paper the authors are able to show that this scenario is in fact prohibited if the sine of the angle between the velocity and the vorticity is small enough with respect to the local enstrophy. The main result is proven very detailed using a lot of functional-analytic estimates. The bibliography which gives a good overview on the field contains 15 items.