HRT

Abstract

The transition from the turbulent state to the laminar regime in plane Couette flow is studied by means of a model focusing on the in-plane (x,z) space dependence of a few velocity amplitudes with reduced wall-normal (y) dependence. The model appears well suited to study the low-R transitional range. I shall present my latest results obtained at very large aspect ratio (typically 768x768 with gap rescaled to 1) and attempt to convince people that the statistical physics of spatiotemporal chaos in extended geometry offers a valuable alternative to the well-accepted interpretation of the relaxation of turbulence in terms of chaotic transients typical of low-dimensional dynamical systems.