Exact Renormalization Group Analysis of Turbulent Transport by the Shear Flow

Abstract

The exact renormalization group (RG) method initiated by Wilson and further developed by Polchinski is used to study the shear flow model proposed by Avellaneda and Majda as a simplified model for the diffusive transport of a passive scalar by a turbulent velocity field. It is shown that this exact RG method is capable of recovering all the scaling regimes as the spectral parameters of velocity statistics vary, found by Avellaneda and Majda in their rigorous study of this model. This gives further confidence that the RG method, if implemented in the right way instead of using drastic truncations as in the Yakhot-Orszag’s approximate RG scheme, does give the correct prediction for the large scale behaviors of solutions of stochastic partial differential equations (PDE). We also derive the analog of the “large eddy simulation” models when a finite amount of small scales are eliminated from the problem.