Energy dissipation rate surrogates in incompressible Navier-Stokes turbulence

High-resolution direct numerical simulations of isotropic homogeneous turbulence are used to understand the differences between the effects of spatial intermittency on the energy dissipation rate and on surrogates for the dissipation rate that are based on measurements of a subset of the strain rate tensor. In particular, the one-dimensional longitudinal and transverse surrogates, as well as a surrogate based on the asymmetric part of the strain rate tensor, are considered. The instantaneous surrogates are studied locally, locally averaged in space and conditionally averaged to see what statistics of the dissipation rate might accurately be inferred given measurements of the surrogates. The simulations with the Reynolds numbers based on the Taylor microscale of 102-235 are highly resolved for accurate evaluation of higher-order statistics. The probability densities of the local and locally averaged surrogates are significantly different from the corresponding statistics for the dissipation rate itself. All of the surrogates are more intermittent than the dissipation rate, the transverse surrogate is more intermittent than the longitudinal and these trends are still prominent even when the fields are spatially averaged at length scales close to the integral length scale. As a consequence, the intermittency exponent computed from the moments of the locally averaged longitudinal and transverse surrogates is approximately 1.5 and 2.2 times higher, respectively, than that computed by the same method from the dissipation rate field. In addition, while different methods of computing intermittency exponent from the dissipation rate field yield the same result, different methods applied to a surrogate are inconsistent.