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Updated: Jun 16, 2025

Preparation of Free-Surface Hyperbolic Water Vortices
Published on: July 28, 2023
Designing turbulence with entangled vortices
Weiyu Shen1, Jie Yao2, Yue Yang1,3
1State Key Laboratory for Turbulence and Complex Systems, Department of Mechanics and Engineering Science, College of Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, People's Republic of China.
Abstract:
Matter entanglement is a common chaotic structure found in both quantum and classical systems. For classical turbulence, viscous vortices are like sinews in fluid flows, storing and dissipating energy and accommodating strain and stress throughout a complex vortex network. However, to explain how the statistical properties of turbulence arise from elemental vortical structures remains challenging. Here, we use the quantum vortex tangle as a skeleton to generate an instantaneous classical turbulent field with intertwined vortex tubes. Combining the quantum skeleton and tunable vortex thickness makes the synthetic turbulence satisfy key statistical laws, offering valuable insights for elucidating energy cascade and extreme events. By manipulating the elemental structures, we customize turbulence with desired statistical features. This bottom-up approach of designing turbulence provides a testbed for analyzing and modeling turbulence.
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