Chatelain Philippe, Kivotides Demosthenes, Leonard Anthony
Graduate Aeronautical Laboratories, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena 91125, USA.
Phys Rev Lett. 2003 Feb 7;90(5):054501. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.90.054501. Epub 2003 Feb 6.
We investigate numerically the Navier-Stokes dynamics of reconnecting vortex rings at small Reynolds number for a variety of configurations. We find that reconnections are dissipative due to the smoothing of vorticity gradients at reconnection kinks and to the formation of secondary structures of stretched antiparallel vorticity which transfer kinetic energy to small scales where it is subsequently dissipated efficiently. In addition, the relaxation of the reconnection kinks excites Kelvin waves which due to strong damping are of low wave number and affect directly only large scale properties of the flow.
