Turbulence and Turbulent Transport

• Turbulence: Ubiquitous in Nature
  • Plasmas (laboratory to galactic scales)
  • Geophysical systems (oceans, atmospheres and magnetospheres)
  • Most man-made fluid and gas systems (pipes, chemical mixing tanks, etc.)
• Turbulent transport (anomalous diffusion): important mechanism for relaxing gradients
  • Temperature, pressure and density gradients in plasmas
  • Constituent gradients in the atmosphere and ocean (pollution, water vapor etc)
• Flows (external or self-generated) often exist in turbulent systems
  • Strong shear flows in laboratory and space plasmas
  • Jets and coherent structures in atmospheres and oceans
  • Differential rotation in stellar systems

Turbulence in a soap film. This beautiful experiment is done at the University of Pittsburgh, for more information visit their site

Turbulence in the ash plume of the Mt. Spurr volcano as it erupts. The turbulence speeds the mixing of the ash in the atmosphere and spreads it much more quickly then otherwise. For more information on Mt. Spurr see the USGS site.

 

Turbulence in the Sun (a fusion plasma). The turbulence in plasmas is very important for transporting heat and particles from one place to another, for example from the core of the sun to the edge. For more information on, and pictures of, the sun see the NASA site.

 

• Simplified models are used to understand the underlying physics of the turbulence and transport
  • Predator - Prey models for the interaction between a flow and the turbulence
  • Self-Organized Criticality (SOC) models for turbulence driven transport based on the dynamics of a sandpile
• More complete "primitive equation" models are used to study the full turbulent dynamics for many systems.
  • Resistive MHD
  • DTEM
  • Resistive G-mode
  • TAE

Recent Papers and Presentations

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This was last changed on 11 Nov 1998

This page is maintained by David Newman