The Statistics of Supersonic Isothermal Turbulence

Abstract

We present results of large-scale three-dimensional simulations of supersonic Euler turbulence with the piecewise parabolic method and multiple grid resolutions up to 2048 3 points. Our numerical experiments describe nonmagnetized driven turbulent flows with an isothermal equation of state and an rms Mach number of 6. We discuss numerical resolution issues and demonstrate convergence, in a statistical sense, of the inertial range dynamics in simulations on grids larger than 512 3 points. The simulations allowed us to measure the absolute velocity scaling exponents for the first time. The inertial range velocity scaling in this strongly compressible regime deviates substantially from the incompressible Kolmogorov laws. The slope of the velocity power spectrum, for instance, is -1.95 compared to -5/3 in the incompressible case. The exponent of the third-order velocity structure function is 1.28, while in incompressible turbulence it is known to be unity. We propose a natural extension of Kolmogorov's phenomenology that takes into account compressibility by mixing the velocity and density statistics and preserves the Kolmogorov scaling of the power spectrum and structure functions of the density-weighted velocity υ ≡ ρ 1/3 u . The low-order statistics of υ appear to be invariant with respect to changes in the Mach number. For instance, at Mach 6 the slope of the power spectrum of υ is -1.69, and the exponent of the third-order structure function of υ is unity. We also directly measure the mass dimension of the "fractal" density distribution in the inertial subrange, D m ≈ 2.4, which is similar to the observed fractal dimension of molecular clouds and agrees well with the cascade phenomenology.