An azimuthally symmetric radially sheared plasma fluid flow is observed to spontaneously form in a cylindrical magnetized helicon plasma device with no external sources of momentum input. A turbulent momentum conservation analysis shows that this shear flow is sustained by the Reynolds stress generated by collisional drift turbulence in the device. The results provide direct experimental suppor...

Using a code based on the Lattice Boltzmann Equation, we have performed numerical simulations of a turbulent shear flow. We investigate the scaling behaviour of the structure functions in presence of anisotropic homogeneous turbulence, and we show that although Extended Self Similarity does not hold when strong shear effects are present, a more generalized scaling law can still be defined. PACS...

We analyse a low-dimensional model for turbulent shear flows. The model is based on Fourier modes and describes sinusoidal shear flow, in which the fluid between two free-slip walls experiences a sinusoidal body force. The model contains a total of nine modes, including modes describing the basic mean velocity profile and its modification, downstream vortices, streaks, and instabilities of stre...

A model of the atmospheric convective boundary layer (CBL) is realized in the thermally stratified wind tunnel of the Institute of Hydrology and Water Resources, University of Karlsruhe. Further experimental results from this model are presented. The wind tunnel with a test section 10 m long, 1.5 m wide, and 1.5 m high allows one to generate a quasi-stationary, horizontally evolving CBL, charac...

We review various prescriptions which have been proposed for the turbulent transport of matter and angular momentum in differentially rotating stellar radiation zones. A new prescription is presented for the horizontal transport associated with the anisotropic shear turbulence which is produced by the differential rotation in latitude; this ‘β-viscosity’ is drawn from torque measurements in the...

Using different analytical methods (the quasilinear approach, the path-integral technique, and the tau-relaxation approximation) we develop a comprehensive mean-field theory for a pumping effect of the mean magnetic field in homogeneous nonrotating helical turbulence with imposed large-scale shear. The effective pumping velocity is proportional to the product of α effect and large-scale vortici...

1 Abstract In this paper we discuss the dynamical features of intermittent fluctuations in homogeneous shear flow turbulence. In this flow the energy cascade is strongly modified by the production of turbulent kinetic energy related to the presence of vortical structures induced by the shear. By using direct numerical simulations, we show that the refined Kolmogorov similarity is broken and a n...

Aims. We provide a consistent theory of the tachocline confinement (or anisotropic momentum transport) within an hydrodynamical turbulence model. The goal is to explain helioseismological data, which show that the solar tachocline thickness is at most 5% of the solar radius, despite the fact that, due to radiative spreading, this transition layer should have thickened to a much more significant...

It has recently been recognized that the non-normality of the dynamical operator obtained by the linearization of the equations of motion about the strongly sheared background flow plays a central role in the dynamics of both fully developed turbulence and laminar/turbulent transition. This advance has led to the development of a deterministic theory for the role of coherent structures in shear...

Variational turbulence is among the few approaches providing rigorous results in turbulence. In addition, it addresses a question of direct practical interest, namely, the rate of energy dissipation. Unfortunately, only an upper bound is obtained as a larger functional space than the space of solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations is searched. Yet, in some cases, this upper bound is in good a...