Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2001 Apr;63(4):047303. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.63.047303. Epub 2001 Mar 28.

Conditional statistics of temperature fluctuations in turbulent convection.

Physical review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics

E S Ching, K L Chau

PMID: 11308985 DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.63.047303

Abstract

We find that the conditional statistics of temperature difference at fixed values of the locally averaged temperature dissipation rate in turbulent convection become Gaussian in the regime where the mixing dynamics is expected to be driven by buoyancy. Hence, intermittency of the temperature fluctuations in this buoyancy-driven regime can be solely attributed to the variation of the locally averaged temperature dissipation rate. We further obtain the functional behavior of these conditional temperature structure functions. This functional form demonstrates explicitly the failure of dimensional arguments and enhances the understanding of the temperature structure functions.

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• Journal Article