Role of pressure in turbulence

Abstract

There is very limited knowledge of the kinematical relations for the velocity structure functions higher than three. Instead, the dynamical equations for the structure functions of the velocity increment are obtained from the Navier Stokes equation under the assumption of the local homogeneity and isotropy. These equations contain the correlation between the velocity and pressure gradient increments, which is very difficult to know theoretically and experimentally. We have examined these dynamical relations by using direct numerical simulation data at very high resolution at large Reynolds numbers, and found that the contribution of the pressure term is important to the dynamics of the longitudinal velocity with large amplitudes. The pressure term is examined from the view point of the conditional average and the role of the pressure term in the turbulence dynamics is discussed.