Biomedical subjects

Antonio Celani

Publications and source records attributed to Antonio Celani.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Large-scale anisotropy in scalar turbulence.

The effect of anisotropy on the statistics of a passive tracer transported by a turbulent flow is investigated. We show that under broad conditions an arbitrarily small amount of anisotropy propagates to the large scales where it eventually dominates the structure of the concentration field. This result is obtained analytically in the framework of an exactly solvable model and confirmed by numerical simulations of scalar transport in two-dimensional turbulence.

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PubMed2006

Rayleigh-Taylor turbulence in two dimensions.

The first consistent phenomenological theory for two- and three-dimensional Rayleigh-Taylor (RT) turbulence has recently been presented by Chertkov [Phys. Rev. Lett. 91, 115001 (2003)]. By means of direct numerical simulations, we confirm the spatiotemporal prediction of the theory in two dimensions and explore the breakdown of the phenomenological description due to intermittency effects. We show that small-scale statistics of velocity and temperature follow Bolgiano-Obukhov scaling. At the level of global observables, we show that the time-dependent Nusselt and Reynolds numbers scale as the square root of the Rayleigh number. These results point to the conclusion that RT turbulence in two and three dimensions, thanks to the absence of boundaries, provides a natural physical realization of the Kraichnan scaling regime hitherto associated with the elusive "ultimate state of thermal convection."

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PubMed2005

Large-scale structure of passive scalar turbulence.

We investigate the large-scale statistics of a passive scalar transported by a turbulent velocity field by means of direct numerical simulations. We focus on scales larger than the characteristic length scale of scalar injection, yet smaller than the correlation length of the velocity. We show the existence of nontrivial long-range correlations in the form of new power laws for the decay of high-order coarse-grained scalar cumulants. This result contradicts the classical scenario of Gibbs equilibrium statistics that should hold in the absence of scalar flux. The breakdown of "thermal equilibrium" at large scales is traced back to the statistical geometry of turbulent dispersion of two scalar blobs. The numerical values obtained for the scaling exponents of the coarse-grained scalar cumulants are in agreement with recent theoretical results.

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PubMed2005

Drag reduction in the turbulent Kolmogorov flow.

We investigate the phenomenon of drag reduction in a viscoelastic fluid model of dilute polymer solutions. By means of direct numerical simulations of the three-dimensional turbulent Kolmogorov flow we show that drag reduction takes place above a critical Reynolds number Re(c). An explicit expression for the dependence of Re(c) on polymer elasticity and diffusivity is derived. The values of the drag coefficient obtained for different fluid parameters collapse onto a universal curve when plotted as a function of the rescaled Reynolds number Re/ Re(c). The analysis of the momentum budget allows us to gain some insight on the physics of drag reduction, and suggests the existence of a Re-independent value of the drag cofficient--lower than the Newtonian one--for large Reynolds numbers.

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PubMed2003

Two-dimensional turbulence of dilute polymer solutions.

We investigate theoretically and numerically the effect of polymer additives on two-dimensional turbulence by means of a viscoelastic model. We provide compelling evidence that, at vanishingly small concentrations, such that the polymers are passively transported, the probability distribution of polymer elongation has a power law tail: Its slope is related to the statistics of finite-time Lyapunov exponents of the flow, in quantitative agreement with theoretical predictions. We show that at finite concentrations and sufficiently large elasticity the polymers react on the flow with manifold consequences: Velocity fluctuations are drastically depleted, as observed in soap film experiments; the velocity statistics becomes strongly intermittent; the distribution of finite-time Lyapunov exponents shifts to lower values, signaling the reduction of Lagrangian chaos.

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PubMed2002

Active versus passive scalar turbulence.

Active and passive scalars transported by an incompressible two-dimensional conductive fluid are investigated. It is shown that a passive scalar displays a direct cascade towards the small scales while the active magnetic potential builds up large-scale structures in an inverse cascade process. Correlations between scalar input and particle trajectories are found to be responsible for those dramatic differences as well as for the behavior of dissipative anomalies.

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PubMed2002

Scaling and universality in turbulent convection.

Anomalous correlation functions of the temperature field in two-dimensional turbulent convection are shown to be universal with respect to the choice of external sources. Moreover, they are equal to the anomalous correlations of the concentration field of a passive tracer advected by the convective flow itself. The statistics of velocity differences is found to be universal, self-similar, and close to Gaussian. These results point to the conclusion that temperature intermittency in two-dimensional turbulent convection may be traced back to the existence of statistically preserved structures, as it is in passive scalar turbulence.

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