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Local Near-Beltrami Structure and Depletion of the Nonlinearity in the 3D Navier–Stokes Flows

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Abstract

Computational simulations of turbulent flows indicate that the regions of low dissipation/enstrophy production feature high degree of local alignment between the velocity and the vorticity, i.e., the flow is locally near-Beltrami. Hence one could envision a geometric scenario in which the persistence of the local near-Beltrami property might be consistent with a (possible) finite-time singularity formation. The goal of this note is to show that this scenario is in fact prohibited if the sine of the angle between the velocity and the vorticity is small enough with respect to the local enstrophy.

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Acknowledgements

The work of Z.G. is supported in part by the National Science Foundation Grant DMS—1515805.

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Correspondence to Aseel Farhat.

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Communicated by Paul Newton.

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Farhat, A., Grujić, Z. Local Near-Beltrami Structure and Depletion of the Nonlinearity in the 3D Navier–Stokes Flows. J Nonlinear Sci 29, 803–812 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00332-018-9504-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00332-018-9504-8

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