Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Anthony Leonard.
We elaborate the physics of systems of unconstrained, reconnecting vortex filaments with dynamic finite cores of uniform ("quantized") circulation interacting via Biot-Savart and viscous forces. The phenomenology of this purely structured turbulent system includes an inertial range with Kolmogorov's k(-5/3) scaling for the energy spectrum, as well as Kolmogorov's linear in r scaling for the third order longitudinal structure function.
We investigate numerically the Navier-Stokes dynamics of reconnecting vortex rings at small Reynolds number for a variety of configurations. We find that reconnections are dissipative due to the smoothing of vorticity gradients at reconnection kinks and to the formation of secondary structures of stretched antiparallel vorticity which transfer kinetic energy to small scales where it is subsequently dissipated efficiently. In addition, the relaxation of the reconnection kinks excites Kelvin waves which due to strong damping are of low wave number and affect directly only large scale properties of the flow.