Turbulent Rankine Vortices

The ‘Rankine vortex’ is a laminar flow model that has been shown to be a reasonably good approximation for commonly-occurring phenomena such as sand devils and tornadoes. By considering the dynamical equilibrium of a statistical ensemble of Rankine vortices, it is possible to recover established expressions in the theory of turbulence for the Kolmogorov dissipation scale and the Pao high-wavenumber correction to the Kolmogorov-Obukhov -5/3 law - without resorting to the usual dimensional arguments. Thus ‘turbulent Rankine vortices’ go a long way to explaining the close relationship between the eddy cascade and fully-developed turbulence.

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