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Updated: Jun 1, 2026

The Diffusion of Passive Tracers in Laminar Shear Flow
Published on: May 1, 2018
Passive scalar structures in supersonic turbulence
1School of Earth and Space Exploration, Arizona State University, P.O. Box 871404, Tempe, Arizona 85287-1404, USA.
Abstract:
We conduct a systematic numerical study of passive scalar structures in supersonic turbulent flows. We find that the degree of intermittency in the scalar structures increases only slightly as the flow changes from transonic to highly supersonic, while the velocity structures become significantly more intermittent. This difference is due to the absence of shocklike discontinuities in the scalar field. The structure functions of the scalar field are well described by the intermittency model of She and Lévêque [Phys. Rev. Lett 72, 336 (1994)], and the most intense scalar structures are found to be sheetlike at all Mach numbers.
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