Structural Studies of Decaying Fluid Turbulence: Effect of Initial Conditions

Abstract

We present results from a systematic numerical study of structural properties of an unforced, incompressible, homogeneous, and isotropic three-dimensional turbulent fluid with an initial energy spectrum that develops a cascade of kinetic energy to large wavenumbers. The results are compared with those from a recently studied set of power-law initial energy spectra [C. Kalelkar and R. Pandit, Phys. Rev. E, {\bf 69}, 046304 (2004)] which do not exhibit such a cascade. Differences are exhibited in plots of vorticity isosurfaces, the temporal evolution of the kinetic energy-dissipation rate, and the rates of production of the mean enstrophy along the principal axes of the strain-rate tensor. A crossover between non-`cascade-type' and `cascade-type' behaviour is shown numerically for a specific set of initial energy spectra.