THE EFFECT OF RAPID

DISTORTION OF A FLUID
IN TURBULENT MOTION
Objective:
• To study the effect of distortions ( turbulent eddies , big velocity
gradients etc on isotropic turbulence
Linearization of the problem for a sufficiently
rapid distortion
• We initially set the conditions for linearizing the displacement of the particles so that it depends
only on the history of the distortion effect and not the effect of neighbouring particles.
• The assumptions needed are neglecting viscosity by assuming that the distortion takes places
much before dissipation can occur and the contribution of turbulent velocity is neglected.
• The following will allow us to obtain the distorted velocities as a linear transformation of the
turbulent velocities.
• An assumption that the distortion is uniform is also taken to remove dependency of initial
position.
• Only the pure strain portion of the distortion tensor is taken into account neglecting effect of
rotation.
• When choosing the principal axes of the pure strain at the time t under consideration as axes of
reference , we will have only the diagonal elements of the pure strain matrix.
Effect of the distortion on the energy
spectrum tensor
• We assume that the turbulence is uniform and go on to express the
turbulent velocity and the distorted velocity in terms of Fourier
components.
• The rest of the portion is dedicated to obtaining the Fourier
coefficients by equating the two velocities