Low-wavenumber forcing and turbulent energy dissipation

Abstract

A popular method of forcing the fluid in Direct Numerical Simulations of turbulence is to take the body force proportional to the projection of the velocity of the fluid onto its lowest Fourier modes, while keeping the injected external power constant. In this paper we perform a simple but rigorous analysis to establish bounds on the relationship between the energy dissipation rate and the resulting Reynolds number for this type of forcing. While this analysis cannot give detailed information of the energy spectrum, it does provide some indication of the balance of energy between the lower, directly forced, modes, and those excited by the cascade.