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Title: Identifying Turbulent Structures through Topological Segmentation

Journal Article · · Communications in Applied Mathematics and Computational Science

A new method of extracting vortical structures from a turbulent flow is proposed whereby topological segmentation of an indicator function scalar field is used to identify the regions of influence of the individual vortices. This addresses a long-standing challenge in vector field topological analysis: indicator functions commonly used produce a scalar field based on the local velocity vector field; reconstructing regions of influence for a particular structure requires selecting a threshold to define vortex extent. In practice, the same threshold is rarely meaningful throughout a given flow. By also considering the topology of the indicator field function, the characteristics of vortex strength and extent can be separated and the ambiguity in the choice of the threshold reduced. The proposed approach is able to identify several types of vortices observed in a jet in cross-flow configuration simultaneously where no single threshold value for a selection of common indicator functions appears able to identify all of these vortex types.

Research Organization:
Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States). Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF); National Renewable Energy Lab. (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC)
DOE Contract Number:
AC36-08GO28308
OSTI ID:
1247959
Report Number(s):
NREL/JA-2C00-65419
Journal Information:
Communications in Applied Mathematics and Computational Science, Vol. 11, Issue 1; Related Information: Communications in Applied Mathematics and Computational Science; ISSN 1559-3940
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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Cited By (1)

T opo MS : Comprehensive topological exploration for molecular and condensed‐matter systems journal March 2018

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