A simple dynamical model of intermittent fully developed turbulence

Abstract

We present a phenomenological model of intermittency called the P-model and related to the Novikov-Stewart (1964) model. The key assumption is that in scales N &2-” only a fraction /3n of the total space has an appreciable excitation. The model, the idea of which owes much to Kraichnan (1972, 1974)’ is dynamical in the sense that we work entirely with inertial-range quantities such as velocity amplitudes, eddy turnover times and energy transfer. This gives more physical insight than the traditional approach based on probabilistic models of the dissipation. The P-model leads in an elementary way to the concept of the self-similarity dimension D, a special case of Mandelbrot’s (1974, 1976) ‘fractal dimension’. For threedimensional turbulence, the correction B to the Q exponent of the energy spectrum is equal to +( 3 - D) and is related to the exponent p of the dissipation correlation function by B = Qp (0.17 for the currently accepted value). This is a borderline case of the Mandelbrot inequality B < Qp. It is shown in the appendix that this inequality may be derived from the Navier-Stokes equation under the strong, but plausible, assumption that the inertial-range scaling laws for second- and fourth-order moments have the same viscous cut-off. The predictions of the P-model for the spectrum and for higher-order statistics are in agreement with recent conjectures based on analogies with critical phenomena (Nelkin 1975) but generally diasgree with the 1962 Kolmogorov lognormal model. However, the sixth-order structure function (8v6(Z)) and the dissipation correlation function (e(r) e(r + 1)) are related by