HRT

Abstract

Dissipation of kinetic energy plays a key role in understanding the statistical properties of turbulence. In this talk, we shall review some recent results obtained by performing high resolution numerical simulations of homogenous and isotropic turbulence. In particular, we present an exhaustive investigation of the statistics of velocity gradients along the trajectories of neutral tracers and of heavy/light particles advected by an homogeneous and isotropic turbulent flow. We propose a Lagrangian rephrasing of the Refined Kolmogorov Similarity Hypothesis (RKSH) and test its validity along the particle trajectories. We also show that for homogenous and isotropic compressible turbulence, there is no statistical differences in the statistical properties of inertial range intermittency due either to the slight compressibility or to the different dissipative mechanism.