Staircase scaling of short-time energy transfer in turbulence

Abstract

It is illustrated that a sharply truncated initial kinetic energy spectrum evolves to a staircase-shaped spectrum at short times. This effect is directly associated with the triadic nature of the energy transfer. A rigorous analysis leads to predictions on the time-dependence of this effect, and these predictions are verified by both direct numerical simulations and eddy-damped quasi-normal Markovian closure integrations.

Keywords:

• Triad interaction
• isotropic turbulence
• scaling

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Liang Shao for discussions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Numbers 11572025, 11772032, 51420105008).