Solenoidal Scaling Laws for Compressible Mixing

Mixing of passive scalars in compressible turbulence does not obey the same classical Reynolds number scaling as its incompressible counterpart. We first show from a large database of direct numerical simulations that even the solenoidal part of the velocity field fails to follow the classical incompressible scaling when the forcing includes a substantial dilatational component. Though the dilatational effects on the flow remain significant, our main results are that both the solenoidal energy spectrum and the passive scalar spectrum assume incompressible forms, and that the scalar gradient essentially aligns with the most compressive eigenvalue of the solenoidal part, provided that only the solenoidal components are consistently used for scaling. A slight refinement of this statement is also pointed out.