T
urbulent patch in stratified environment it’s a model of strong episodic turbulent events that are present in oceanic and atmospheric flows. Have you ever felt the “bumpiness” during the flights? Some of those are due to the localized turbulent events. How these grow, do they saturate, what is their lifetime?
Another stratified flow project is a two-layer model that Lilly Verso has studied during his Ph.D. – the system is shown in
and here Lilly installs the system of Schlieren and Background Oriented Schlieren
The stratified flows in Schlieren are beautiful
but of course the important thing is the analytical model that accompanied the experiments and that provided us with the data over two decades of Richardson number. We could quantify the entrainment rate in a new system that for the first time is absolutely in the steady state, i.e. the turbulent/non-turbulent interface is steady (not moving) and the entrainment rate is constant.