Lagrangian acceleration in fully developed turbulence and its Eulerian decompositions

Abstract

We study the properties of various Eulerian contributions to fluid particle acceleration by using well-resolved direct numerical simulations of isotropic turbulence, with the grid resolution as high as $12288^3$ and the Taylor-scale Reynolds number $R_\lambda$ in the range between 140 and 1300. The variance of convective acceleration, when normalized by Kolmogorov scales, increases linearly with $R_\lambda$, consistent with simple theoretical arguments, but very strongly differing from phenomenological predictions of Kolmogorov's hypothesis as well as Eulerian multifractal models. The scaling of the local acceleration is also linear $R_\lambda$ to the leading order, but more complex in detail. The strong cancellation between the local and convective acceleration -- faithful to the random sweeping hypothesis -- results in the variance of the Lagrangian acceleration increasing only as $R_\lambda^{0.25}$, as recently shown by Buaria \& Sreenivasan [Phys. Rev. Lett. 128, 234502 (2022)]. The acceleration variance is dominated by irrotational pressure gradient contributions, whose variance also follows an $R_\lambda^{0.25}$ scaling; the solenoidal viscous contributions are relatively small and follow a $R_\lambda^{0.13}$, consistent with Eulerian multifractal predictions.