Energy Flux and Bottleneck Effect in Turbulence

Abstract

Past numerical simulations and experiments of turbulence exhibit a hump in the inertial range, called the bottleneck effect. In this paper we show that sufficiently large inertial range (four decades) is required for an effective energy cascade. We propose that the bottleneck effect is due to the insufficient inertial range available in the reported simulations and experiments. To facilitate the turbulent energy transfer, the spectrum near Kolmogorov's dissipation wavenumber has a hump.