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Turbulence. A tentative dictionary. Proceedings of a NATO Advanced Study Institute on turbulence, weak and strong, August 2-14, 1993, Cargèse, France. (English) Zbl 0848.76001

NATO ASI Series. Series B. Physics. 341. New York, NY: Plenum Press. xii, 149 p. (1994).
[The articles of this volume will not be indexed individually.]
One of the objectives of this book is to incorporate two aspects of turbulence, which are obviously linked, and which are often treated separately: fully developed turbulence (in two and three dimensions) and weak turbulence (essentially one- and two-dimensional systems). The idea of preparing a dictionary rather than ordinary proceedings started from the feeling that the terminology of turbulence includes many long, technical, poorly evocative words, which are usually not understood by people exterior to the field, and which might be worth explaining. Students who start working in the field of turbulence use most of their energy investigating quantities as sophisticated as high order structure functions of the velocity increments, spectra of the enstrophy, or the phase of some slowly varying complex variable. It is certainly necessary to consider these quantities for studying turbulence. High order structure functions underline the contributions of rare events, enstrophy decay is a measure of the filamentation process in two-dimensional turbulence, and most of the weakly turbulent flow pattern can be described in terms of slowly varying complex variables. Also, there are simpler words, such as vortex filaments, or vortex ribbons which are currently used in the field and whose physical meaning is more straightforward to capture. But clearly, we had the feeling that it could be useful to change a little the format of the proceedings, and try to build, tentatively, a dictionary, where several concepts are explained, so as to help young researchers and non experts being introduced in the field. This is the goal of this volume.
The organization of this book mimics that of an encyclopedia, and each article is devoted to reviewing a concept in a few pages. In most cases, the articles are accessible to readers unfamiliar with the concepts of turbulence. There are 23 entries, covering a significant part of the important concepts used in the domain; obviously, several words, currently used in the field, are missing, but the scope covered by the present book seems wide enough to justify the title “Tentative Dictionary on Turbulence”.

MSC:

76-00 General reference works (handbooks, dictionaries, bibliographies, etc.) pertaining to fluid mechanics
76Fxx Turbulence
00A20 Dictionaries and other general reference works
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