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Rare transitions to thin-layer turbulent condensates

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 September 2019

Adrian van Kan Open the ORCID record for Adrian van Kan [Opens in a new window] ,
Takahiro Nemoto  and
Alexandros Alexakis Open the ORCID record for Alexandros Alexakis [Opens in a new window]
Adrian van Kan*
Affiliation:
Laboratoire de Physique de l’Ecole normale supérieure, ENS, Université PSL, CNRS, Sorbonne Université, Université Paris-Diderot, Sorbonne Paris Cité, 75005 Paris, France
Takahiro Nemoto
Affiliation:
Philippe Meyer Institute for Theoretical Physics, Physics Department, École Normale Supérieure and PSL Research University, 24 rue Lhomond, 75231 Paris CEDEX 05, France
Alexandros Alexakis
Affiliation:
Laboratoire de Physique de l’Ecole normale supérieure, ENS, Université PSL, CNRS, Sorbonne Université, Université Paris-Diderot, Sorbonne Paris Cité, 75005 Paris, France
*
†Email address for correspondence: avankan@phys.ens.fr
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Abstract

Turbulent flows in a thin layer can develop an inverse energy cascade leading to spectral condensation of energy when the layer height is smaller than a certain threshold. These spectral condensates take the form of large-scale vortices in physical space. Recently, evidence for bistability was found in this system close to the critical height: depending on the initial conditions, the flow is either in a condensate state with most of the energy in the two-dimensional (2-D) large-scale modes, or in a three-dimensional (3-D) flow state with most of the energy in the small-scale modes. This bistable regime is characterised by the statistical properties of random and rare transitions between these two locally stable states. Here, we examine these statistical properties in thin-layer turbulent flows, where the energy is injected by either stochastic or deterministic forcing. To this end, by using a large number of direct numerical simulations (DNS), we measure the decay time $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}_{d}$ of the 2-D condensate to 3-D flow state and the build-up time $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}_{b}$ of the 2-D condensate. We show that both of these times $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}_{d},\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}_{b}$ follow an exponential distribution with mean values increasing faster than exponentially as the layer height approaches the threshold. We further show that the dynamics of large-scale kinetic energy may be modelled by a stochastic Langevin equation. From time-series analysis of DNS data, we determine the effective potential that shows two minima corresponding to the 2-D and 3-D states when the layer height is close to the threshold.

JFM classification

Turbulent Flows: Turbulent transition Turbulent Flows: Turbulence simulation Vortex Flows: Vortex breakdown
Type
JFM Papers
Information
Journal of Fluid Mechanics , Volume 878 , 10 November 2019 , pp. 356 - 369
Copyright
© 2019 Cambridge University Press 

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