Lagrangian statistics of pressure fluctuation events in homogeneous isotropic turbulence

Abstract

Homogeneous and isotropic turbulent fields obtained from two direct numerical simulation databases (with Reλ equal to 150 and 418) were seeded with point particles that moved with the local fluid velocity to obtain Lagrangian pressure histories. Motivated by cavitation inception modeling, the statistics of events in which such particles undergo low-pressure fluctuations were computed, parameterized by the amplitude of the fluctuations and by their duration. The main results are the average frequencies of these events and the probabilistic distribution of their duration, which are of predictive value. A connection is also established between these average frequencies and the pressure probability density function, thus justifying experimental methods proposed in the literature. Further analyses of the data show that the occurrence of very-low-pressure events is highly intermittent and is associated with wormlike vortical structures of length comparable to the integral scale of the flow.