Origin of intermittency in fully developed turbulence

Abstract

Qualitative arguments based on the physics of vortex stretching indicate that Kolmogorov's mean-field theory of strong turbulence must be unstable and tend to a state in which fluctuations become increasingly singular at short distances, as proposed by Kolmogorov and Oboukhov in 1962. The number of coupled degrees of freedom in the Navier-Stokes equations is then greatly reduced by a wave-packet analysis, and the essence of the vortex stretching picture is recovered. Numerical integration of the reduced equations confirms the qualitative arguments for intermittency and gives exponents and probability distributions in crude agreement with experiment and the log-normality hypothesis. © 1977 The American Physical Society.