Decaying turbulence and developing chaotic attractors

Abstract: Competition between two main attractors of the distributed chaos, one associated with translational symmetry (homogeneity) and another associated with rotational symmetry (isotropy), has been studied in freely decaying turbulence. It is shown that, unlike the case of statistically stationary homogeneous isotropic turbulence, the attractor associated with rotational symmetry (and controlled by Loitsyanskii integral) can dominate turbulent local dynamics in an intermediate stage of the decay, because the attractor associated with translational symmetry (and controlled by Birkhoff-Saffman integral) is still not developed enough. The DNS data have been used in order to support this conclusion.