Definitions of vortex vector and vortex

Abstract

Although the vortex is ubiquitous in nature, its definition is somewhat ambiguous in the field of fluid dynamics. In this absence of a rigorous mathematical definition, considerable confusion appears to exist in visualizing and understanding the coherent vortical structures in turbulence. Cited in the previous studies, a vortex cannot be fully described by vorticity, and vorticity should be further decomposed into a rotational and a non-rotational part to represent the rotation and the shear, respectively. In this paper, we introduce several new concepts, including local fluid rotation at a point and the direction of the local fluid rotation axis. The direction and the strength of local fluid rotation are examined by investigating the kinematics of the fluid element in two- and three-dimensional flows. A new vector quantity, which is called the vortex vector in this paper, is defined to describe the local fluid rotation and it is the rotational part of the vorticity. This can be understood as that the direction of the vortex vector is equivalent to the direction of the local fluid rotation axis, and the magnitude of vortex vector is the strength of the location fluid rotation. With these new revelations, a vortex is defined as a connected region where the vortex vector is not zero. In addition, through direct numerical simulation (DNS) and large eddy simulation (LES) examples, it is demonstrated that the newly defined vortex vector can fully describe the complex vertical structures of turbulence.