On the transport equation for probability density functions of turbulent vorticity fields

Abstract: The vorticity random field of turbulent flow is singled out as the main dynamical variable for the description of turbulence, and the evolution equation of the probability density function (PDF) of the vorticity field has been obtained. This PDF evolution equation is a mixed type partial differential equation (PDE) of second order which depends only on the conditional mean (first order) of the underlying turbulent flow, which is in contrast with Reynolds' mean flow equation which relies on a quadratic statistics. Therefore the new PDF PDE may provide new closure scheme based on the conditional linear statistics, and some of them will be described in the present paper too.