NASA NTRS1994
Analyzing turbulent flows with rotation, Dubrulle and Valdettaro have concluded that some new effects come into play and may modify the standard picture we have concerning turbulence. In that respect the value of the Rossby number is of crucial importance since it will determine the transition between regimes where rotation is or is not important. With rotation there will be a tendency to constrain the motion to the plane perpendicular to the rotation axis and as a consequence the horizontal scale will increase as compared to the longitudinal one, which means that the turnover time in this direction will increase. The net effect is that the energy cascade down process is hindered by rotation. As a matter of fact, when rotation is present one observes two cascades: an enstrophy (vorticity) cascade from large scales to small scales; and an inverse energy cascade from small scales to large scales. Since the first process is not efficient on transporting energy to the dissipation range, what we see is energy storage in the large structures at the expense of the small structures. This kind of behavior has been confirmed experimentally. For a very large gamma we obtain, in the inertial range, a spectrum of k(exp -3) instead of the usual Kilmogorov's k(exp -5/3) spectrum. In reality, when rotation is dominant, energy gets stored in inertial waves that propagate it essentially in the longitudinal direction. In that case, we can no longer assign just one viscosity to the fluid and, what is most important, the concept of viscosity loses its meaning since we no longer have local transport of energy. Such results, however, were derived considering a hot disk, in which opacity is mainly given by electron scattering. In the present work we have applied the formulation developed in the previous work for the description of the viscous-stage solar nebula.