FLAPPING MODEL OF SCALAR MIXING IN TURBULENCE

Motivated by the fluctuating plume model of turbulent mixing downstream of a point source, a flapping model is formulated for application to other configurations. For the scalar mixing layer, simple expressions for single-point scalar fluctuation statistics are obtained that agree with measurements. For a spatially homogeneous scalar mixing field, the family of probability density functions previously derived using mapping closure is reproduced. It is inferred that single-point scalar statistics may depend primarily on large-scale flapping motions in many cases of interest, and thus that multipoint statistics may be the principal indicators of finer-scale mixing effects.