Methods to Identify Individual Eddy Structures in Turbulent Flow

Turbulent flows are intrinsic to many processes in science and engineering, and efforts to elucidate the physics of turbulence are of critical importance to many fields. However, ongoing efforts to achieve a fundamental understanding of the mechanisms of turbulent flow are hindered by the difficulty of quantifying the complex, nonlinear interactions between individual eddies in these flows. The difficulty of this task is compounded by the lack of robust methods for accurately identifying individual eddy structures and characterizing their dynamic evolution and organization across multiple scales. In this paper we address this problem by proposing several novel approaches for more accurately segmenting individual eddy structures in turbulent flows.