Study Challenges Long-Held Principles on Turbulent Flows in New Findings
Experiments conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPI-DS) in Göttingen reveal that the scaling laws formulated over 80 years ago, which explain turbulent flows, are only partially accurate. The study shows that these laws, established by mathematician Andrei Kolmogorov in 1941, apply only to strongly idealized flows and do not fully explain real-world turbulence. The researchers used a unique wind tunnel to generate high degrees of turbulence and found systematic deviations from Kolmogorov's predictions, suggesting that medium-sized eddies are not completely decoupled from larger eddies in a system. The findings have implications for understanding turbulence in engineered flows and climate models.