The exact evolution of the scalar variance in pipe and channel flow (Q983121)

The paper tackles the classical Taylor problem of the enhanced diffusion of a passive tracer in a laminar flow inside a pipe or a channel. The approach employs the stochastic differential equations describing the evolution of the passive tracer with Neumann boundary conditions. For the case of channel and pipe flows, the random trajectories have been calculated in a closed form along with the variance by using the Green's functions for the heat equations in the considered geometry and the rules of conditional probability. Explicit formulas for the evolution of the variance of the scalar tracer are given for a large class of initial conditions. These formulae provide rigorous short and long time asymptotics and show the appearance of an anomalous scaling regime along with the universality of the Taylor time scale. It is also proved that the anomalous scaling regime depends nontrivially on the form of the transverse initial data and that the variance predicted by Latini and Bernoff, using free space methods, arises directly from the stochastic differential approach by simply replacing the bounded Brownian motion with the free space one. Higher order statistics are discussed as well and the evolution of the skewness is studied via Monte Carlo simulations, showing that the anomalous time scale computed for the variance matches the timescale when a non zero skewness appears.