Turbulent Mixing in Nonreactive and Reactive Flows

Turbulence, mixing and the mutual interaction of turbulence and chemistry continue to remain perplexing and impregnable in the fron­ tiers of fluid mechanics. The past ten years have brought enormous advances in computers and computational techniques on the one hand and in measurements and data processing on the other. The impact of such capabilities has led to a revolution both in the understanding of the structure of turbulence as well as in the predictive methods for application in technology. The early ideas on turbulence being an array of complicated phenomena and having some form of reasonably strong coherent struc­ ture have become well substantiated in recent experimental work. We are still at the very beginning of understanding all of the aspects of such coherence and of the possibilities of incorporating such structure into the analytical models for even those cases where the thin shear layer approximation may be valid. Nevertheless a distinguished body of "eddy chasers" has come into existence. The structure of mixing layers which has been studied for some years in terms of correlations and spectral analysis is also getting better understood. Both probability concepts such as intermittency and conditional sampling as well as the concept of large scale structure and the associated strain seem to indicate possibilities of distinguishing and synthesizing 'engulfment' and molecular mixing.