Kolmogorov’s contributions to the physical and geometrical understanding of small-scale turbulence and recent developments

Abstract

This paper reviews how Kolmogorov postulated for the first time the existence of a steady statistical state for small-scale turbulence, and its defining parameters of dissipation rate and kinematic viscosity. Thence he made quantitative predictions of the statistics by extending previous methods of dimensional scaling to multiscale random processes. We present theoretical arguments and experimental evidence to indicate when the small-scale motions might tend to a universal form (paradoxically not necessarily in uniform flows when the large scales are gaussian and isotropic), and discuss the implications for the kinematics and dynamics of the fact that there must be singularities in the velocity field associated with the - 5/3 inertial range spectrum. These may be particular forms of eddy or ‘eigenstructure’ such as spiral vortices, which may not be unique to turbulent flows. Also, they tend to lead to the notable spiral contours of scalars in turbulence, whose self-similar structure enables the ‘box-counting’ technique to be used to measure the ‘capacity’ D K of the contours themselves or of their intersections with lines, D' K . Although the capacity, a term invented by Kolmogorov (and studied thoroughly by Kolmogorov & Tikhomirov), is like the exponent 2 p of a spectrum in being a measure of the distribution of length scales ( D' K being related to 2 p in the limit of very high Reynolds numbers), the capacity is also different in that experimentally it can be evaluated at local regions within a flow and at lower values of the Reynolds number. Thus Kolmogorov & Tikhomirov provide the basis for a more widely applicable measure of the self-similar structure of turbulence. Finally, we also review how Kolmogorov’s concept of the universal spatial structure of the small scales, together with appropriate additional physical hypotheses, enables other aspects of turbulence to be understood at these scales; in particular the general forms of the temporal statistics such as the high-frequency (inertial range) spectra in eulerian and lagrangian frames of reference, and the perturbations to the small scales caused by non-isotropic, non-gaussian and inhomogeneous large-scale motions.