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Principles of Physical Sedimentology pp 103–122Cite as

Order in chaos

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Abstract

In Section 1.9 we briefly introduced turbulence and described an experiment illustrating turbulent flow. Turbulence might thereby have been painted as a thoroughly disorderly time-dependent fluid motion, marked by velocity fluctuations of a wide range of period and of all wavelengths, between a viscosity-related minimum and a maximum controlled by flow dimensions. Is turbulence just a random stochastic phenomenon, susceptible only to elaborate statistical description? The experiment does not test the whole truth. Recent research on the origins and pathways of turbulent energy reveals that turbulence is orderly and deterministic, as well as stochastic. Turbulent flows comprise definable flow configurations — eddies or vortices are less fancy terms — which are coherent, that is, they retain their character over a substantial downstream transport distance (Laufer 1975, Cantwell 1981). Moreover, these coherent structures, occurring on two main scales, depend for their character on such flow properties as boundary shear stress (describing wall conditions) and the flow thickness and mean velocity (typifying the outer flow).

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  1. Department of Geology, University of Reading, UK

    J. R. L. Allen

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© 1985 J.R.L. Allen

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Allen, J.R.L. (1985). Order in chaos. In: Principles of Physical Sedimentology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-9683-6_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-9683-6_6

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-94-010-9685-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-010-9683-6

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