The transport of heat in laboratory and astrophysical plasmas is dominated by the complex nonlinear dynamics of plasma turbulence. In magnetically confined plasmas used for fusion energy research, turbulence is responsible for cross-field transport that limits the performance of tokamak reactors. We report a set of novel gyrokinetic simulations that capture ion and electron-scale turbulence sim...

The main goal of the present work is to test the hypothesis that small-scale turbulence affected physiological activities and the morphology of cyanobacteria in high turbulence environments. Using quantified turbulence in a stirring device, we conducted one set of experiments on cultures of two strains of cyanobacteria with different phenotypes; i.e., unicellular Microcystis flos-aquae and colo...

We discuss averaged turbulence modeling of multi-scales of length for an incompressible Newtonian fluid, with the help of the maximum information principle. We suppose that there exists a function basis to decompose the turbulent fluctuations in a flow of our concern into the components associated with various spatial scales and that there is a probability density function f of these fluctuatio...

The nonlinear mean-field dynamo due to a shear-current effect in a nonhelical homogeneous turbulence with a mean velocity shear is discussed. The transport of magnetic helicity as a dynamical nonlinearity is taken into account. The shear-current effect is associated with the W×J term in the mean electromotive force, where W is the mean vorticity due to the large-scale shear motions and J is the...

The effect of turbulence on mixing in prototype reaction-diffusion systems is analyzed here in the special situation where the turbulence is modeled ideally with two separated scales consisting of a large-scale mean flow plus a small-scale spatiotemporal periodic flow. In the limit of fast reaction and slow diffusion, it is rigorously proved that the turbulence does not contribute to the locati...

We study two-dimensional incompressible turbulence on the beta plane and propose a modification to the Rhines scale that takes into account the bottom friction. The modified Rhines scale is studied numerically, and found to predict accurately the jet number and the energy peak of the beta-plane turbulence for strong beta. The intermediate cases show a transition from the (isotropic) friction sc...

Large-eddy simulation (LES) is used to investigate how dominant breaking waves in the ocean under hurricane-force winds affect the drag and near-surface airflow turbulence. The LES explicitly resolves the wake turbulence produced by dominant-scale breakers. Effects of unresolved roughness such as short breakers, nonbreaking waves, and sea foam are modeled as the subgrid-scale drag. Compared to ...