Helicity production in the transition to chaotic flow simulated by Navier-Stokes equation

Influence of initial mean helicity on homogeneous turbulent shear flow

Helicity statistics are studied in homogeneous turbulent shear flow. Initial mean helicity is imposed on an isotropic turbulence field using a decomposition of the flow into complex-valued helical waves. The initial decay of the turbulent kinetic energy is weakened in the presence of strong mean helicity, consistent with an analytic analysis of the spectral tensor of velocity correlations. While exponential growth of the mean turbulent kinetic energy is obtained, the mean helicity decays. Probability distribution functions (PDFs) of helicity are skewed and show that the imposed mean helicity prevails throughout the simulations. A wavelet-based scale-dependent analysis shows a trend to two dimensionalization for large scales of motion and a preference for helical motion at small scales. The magnitude of the skewness of the PDFs decreases for smaller scales. Joint PDFs indicate a strong correlation of the signs of both, helicity and superhelicity, for all cases. This correlation supports the conjecture that superhelicity dissipates helicity.

The interplay between helicity and rotation in turbulence: implications for scaling laws and small-scale dynamics

Invariance properties of physical systems govern their behaviour: energy conservation in turbulence drives a wide distribution of energy among modes, as observed in geophysical or astrophysical flows. In ideal hydrodynamics, the role of the invariance of helicity (correlation between velocity and its curl, measuring departures from mirror symmetry) remains unclear since it does not alter the energy spectrum. However, in the presence of rotation, significant differences emerge between helical and non-helical turbulent flows. We first briefly outline some of the issues such as the partition of energy and helicity among modes. Using massive numerical simulations, we then show that small-scale structures and their intermittency properties differ according to whether helicity is present or not, in particular with respect to the emergence of Beltrami core vortices that are laminar helical vertical updraft vortices. These results point to the discovery of a small parameter besides the Rossby number, a fact that would relate the problem of rotating helical turbulence to that of critical phenomena, through the renormalization group and weak-turbulence theory. This parameter can be associated with the adimensionalized ratio of the energy to helicity flux to small scales, the three-dimensional energy cascade being weak and self-similar.