Heat equilibrium distribution in a turbulent flow

Z. Haba

Published 2006-01-18, updated 2006-06-06Version 2

We consider a shear flow of a scale invariant homogeneous Gaussian random velocity field which does not depend on coordinates in the direction of the flow. We investigate a heat advection coming from a Gaussian random homogeneous source. We discuss a relaxation at large time of a temperature distribution determined by the forced advection-diffusion equation. We represent the temperature correlation functions by means of the Feynman-Kac formula. Jensen inequalities are applied for lower and upper bounds on the correlation functions. We show that at finite time there is no velocity dependence of long range temperature correlations (low momentum asymptotics) in the direction of the flow but the equilibrium heat distribution has large distance correlations (low momentum behaviour) with an index depending on the scaling index of the random flow and of the index of the random forcing. If the velocity has correlations growing with the distance (a turbulent flow) then the large distance correlations depend in a crucial way on the scaling index of the turbulent flow. In such a case the correlations increase in the direction of the flow and decrease in the direction perpendicular to the flow making the stream of heat more coherent.