Turbulent Diffusion

Turbulent diffusion is the transport of mass, heat, or momentum within a system due to random and chaotic time dependent motions. It occurs when turbulent fluid systems reach critical conditions in response to shear flow, which results from a combination of steep concentration gradients, density gradients, and high velocities. It occurs much more rapidly than molecular diffusion and is therefore extremely important for problems concerning mixing and transport in systems dealing with combustion, contaminants, dissolved oxygen, and solutions in industry. In these fields, turbulent diffusion acts as an excellent process for quickly reducing the concentrations of a species in a fluid or environment, in cases where this is needed for rapid mixing during processing, or rapid pollutant or contaminant reduction for safety.

However, it has been extremely difficult to develop a concrete and fully functional model that can be applied to the diffusion of a species in all turbulent systems due to the inability to characterize both an instantaneous and predicted fluid velocity simultaneously. In turbulent flow, this is a result of several characteristics such as unpredictability, rapid diffusivity, high levels of fluctuating vorticity, and dissipation of kinetic energy.