The present manuscript deals with the statistical mechanics of some inviscid fluidmodels which are possibly relevant in the context of geophysics and astrophysics. Weinvestigate the case of axially symmetric flows, two-dimensional Boussinesq flows, andtwo-dimensional magneto-hydro fluids. Those flows can be loosely referred to as twodimensionalflows with three components ("2D3C"). In addition to the two-dimensionalvelocity field, they describe the evolution of an additional field variable, which representseither a magnetic current, a salinity, a temperature or a swirl depending on the situation.In common with the dynamics of strictly two-dimensional hydrodynamical flows, thenon-linear dynamics of 2D3C flows is constrained by the presence of an infinite numberof Casimir invariants, which emerge as dynamical invariants in the limit of a vanishingforcing and a vanishing dissipation . In common with three-dimensional flows, the vorticityis not only mixed but also stretched by the dynamics. The additional field may actas a source or a sink of kinetic energy. It is commonly believed that such flows have thepropensity to develop large scale coherent structures. Whether those long lived structuresare equilibrium or metastable structures is however not so clear, nor are the exactconditions of their emergence. The role of the Casimir invariants in constraining those isnot so obvious either.
Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:CCSD/oai:tel.archives-ouvertes.fr:tel-00920982 |
Date | 28 October 2013 |
Creators | Thalabard, Simon |
Publisher | Université Paris Sud - Paris XI |
Source Sets | CCSD theses-EN-ligne, France |
Language | English |
Detected Language | English |
Type | PhD thesis |
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