Joint Probability Distribution Functions for the Filtered Velocity Gradient Invariants in Homogeneous Isotropic Turbulence

Methods: The Fourier decomposition and the anisotropic diffusion model are used in the investigation. The extraction process is performed by employing the Fourier decomposition at different cutoff wavenumbers for the velocity field and three distinct scales (large, medium and fine scale) are identified. The velocity gradient invariants such as the second invariant Q and the third invariant R for the different scales are extracted. Then other important invariants such as the rate of rotation tensor QW and the rate of deformation QS are also identified for each scale. The anisotropic diffusion model is used to extract the coherent and incoherent parts of each invariant at each scale. Then the JPDFs of the coherent and incoherent invariants are compared. The scale decomposition and the filtering process are applied for turbulent flow fields that are simulated using the lattice Boltzmann method with resolution of 128.