Dynamics of three-dimensional turbulence from Navier-Stokes equations

Abstract: We accomplish two major tasks. First, we show that the turbulent motion at large scales obeys Gaussian statistics in the interval 0 < Rlambda < 8.8, where Rlambda is the microscale Reynolds number, and that the Gaussian flow breaks down to yield place to anomalous scaling at the universal Reynolds number bounding the inequality above. In the inertial range of turbulence that emerges following the breakdown, the effective Reynolds number based on the turbulent viscosity, Rlambda* assumes this same constant value of about 9. This scenario works also for the emergence of turbulence from an initially non-turbulent state. Second, we derive expressions for the anomalous scaling exponents of structure functions and moments of spatial derivatives, by analyzing the Navier-Stokes equations in the form developed by Hopf. We present a novel procedure to close the Hopf equation, resulting in expressions for zetan in the entire range of allowable moment-order, n, and demonstrate that accounting for the temporal dynamics changes the scaling from normal to anomalous. For large n, the theory predicts the saturation of zetan with n, leading to two inferences: (a) the smallest length scale etan = LRe-1 << LRe-3/4, where Re is the large-scale Reynolds number, and (b) velocity excursions across even the smallest length scales can sometimes be as large as the large scale velocity itself. Theoretical predictions for each of these aspects are shown to be in quantitative agreement with available experimental and numerical data.