Distillation and visualization of spatiotemporal structures in turbulent flow fields

Abstract

Although turbulence suggests randomness and disorder, organized motions that cause spatiotemporal 'coherent structures' are of particular interest. Revealing such structures in numerically given turbulent or semi-turbulent flows is of interest both for practically working engineers and theoretically oriented physicists. However, as long as there is no common agreement about the mathematical definition of coherent structures, extracting such structures is a vaguely defined task. Instead of searching for a general definition, the data visualization community takes a pragmatic approach and provides various tool chains implemented in flexible software frameworks that allow the user to extract distinct flow field structures. Thus physicists or engineers can select those flow structures which might advance their insight best. We present different approaches to distill important features from turbulent flows and discuss the necessary steps to be taken on the example of Lagrangian coherent structures.