Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: The entrainment hypothesis states that the mean inflow velocity across the boundary of a turbulent flow is proportional to a characteristic velocity of the flow. Proposed by G. I. Taylor approximately 80 years ago, it is still a common model of turbulence closure widely used in environmental engineering and geophysical fluid mechanics. Although it is a very simple concept and mathematical model, it has proven to be able to predict the entrainment in a variety of geophysical flows, e.g. convective clouds and plumes from erupting volcanoes in the atmosphere; dense water overflows and turbidity currents in the ocean; magma injection in a magma chamber in the interior of the Earth, to name just a few. In a seminal paper, Turner (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 173, 1986, pp. 431–471) presents a variety of laboratory and geophysical flows to illustrate the success of the entrainment hypothesis and discusses why such a simple hypothesis works so well even when the original assumptions are no longer valid.
Source: Journal of Fluid Mechanics
DOI: 10.1017/jfm.2024.862
Author: Claudia Cenedese
Institution: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Language: English
Subfield: Computational Mechanics
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4404580051