Scale invariance of intermittency in LES turbulence

Abstract

Turbulent flows exhibit large intermittent fluctuations from inertial to dissipative scales, characterized by multifractal statistics and breaking the statistical self-similarity. It has recently been proposed that the Navier-Stokes turbulence restores a hidden form of scale invariance in the inertial interval when formulated for a dynamically (nonlinearly) rescaled quasi-Lagrangian velocity field. Here we show that such hidden self-similarity extends to the Large-Eddy Simulation (LES) approach in computational fluid dynamics (CFD). In particular, we show that classical subgrid-scale models, such as implicit or explicit Smagorinsky closures, respect the hidden scale invariance at all scales -- both resolved and subgrid. In the inertial range, they reproduce the hidden scale invariance of Navier-Stokes statistics. These properties are verified very accurately by numerical simulations and, beyond CFD, turn LES into a valuable tool for fundamental turbulence research.