The curvature of material surfaces in isotropic turbulence

Direct numerical simulation is used to study the curvature of material surfaces in isotropic turbulence. The Navier–Stokes equation is solved by a 643 pseudospectral code for constant-density homogeneous isotropic turbulence, which is made statistically stationary by low-wavenumber forcing. The Taylor-scale Reynolds number is 39. An ensemble of 8192 infinitesimal material surface elements is tracked through the turbulence. For each element, a set of exact ordinary differential equations is integrated in time to determine, primarily, the two principal curvatures k1 and k2. Statistics are then deduced of the mean-square curvature M= (1)/(2) (k21+k22), and of the mean radius of curvature R=(k21+k22)−1/2. Curvature statistics attain an essentially stationary state after about 15 Kolmogorov time scales. Then the area-weighted expectation of R is found to be 12η, where η is the Kolmogorov length scale. For moderate and small radii (less than 10η) the probability density function (pdf) of R is approximately uniform, there being about 5% probability of R being less than η. The uniformity of the pdf of R, for small R, implies that the expectation of M is infinite. It is found that the surface elements with large curvatures are nearly cylindrical in shape (i.e., ‖k1‖≫‖k2‖ or ‖k2‖≫‖k1‖), consistent with the folding of the surface along nearly straight lines. Nevertheless the variance of the Gauss curvature K=k1k2 is infinite.