An upper bound for passive scalar diffusion in shear flows

DOI10.1063/1.2744050MaRDI QIDQ5190682zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Chuong V. Tran

Publication date 18 March 2010

Published in Physics of Fluids (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/0705.1140

zbMATH Keywords

diffusionshear flow

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Fluid mechanics (76-XX)

Abstract: This study is concerned with the diffusion of a passive scalar $Theta(,t)$ advected by general $n$-dimensional shear flows $u=u(y,z,\mathrm{...},t)hatx$ having finite mean-square velocity gradients. The unidirectionality of the incompressible flows conserves the stream-wise scalar gradient, $partia{l}_{x}Theta$, allowing only the cross-stream components to be amplified by shearing effects. This amplification is relatively weak because an important contributing factor, $partia{l}_{x}Theta$, is conserved, effectively rendering a slow diffusion process. It is found that the decay of the scalar variance $<Thet{a}^2>$ satisfies $d<Thet{a}^2>/dtge-Ckapp{a}^{1/3}$, where $C>0$ is a constant, depending on the fluid velocity gradients and initial distribution of $Theta$, and $kappa$ is the molecular diffusivity. This result generalizes to axisymmetric flows on the plane and on the sphere having finite mean-square angular velocity gradients.

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Cited in

(4)

• Finite scale Lyapunov analysis of temperature fluctuations in homogeneous isotropic turbulence
• Constraints on scalar diffusion anomaly in three-dimensional flows having bounded velocity gradients
• Lower bounds on the mix norm of passive scalars advected by incompressible enstrophy-constrained flows
• An integral representation and bounds on the effective diffusivity in passive advection by laminar and turbulent flows

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