Complex diffusion filtering of three dimensional turbulent flows

The linear and nonlinear complex diffusion filtering methods are proposed to extract the organized coherent part as well as the random incoherent part from forced and decaying turbulent flows. An attempt to examine the robustness of the two methods in filtering the turbulent flow field without the transformation into the frequency domain is carried out. The velocity fields of the forced and decaying cases are decomposed into coherent and incoherent parts in the spatial domain. The complex diffusion process can be obtained by combining the linear diffusion equation and the free particle Schrodinger equation. The imaginary parts in the two methods serve as a robust edge-detector with increasing confidence in time. The numerical implementations of the 3D linear and nonlinear complex diffusion partial differential equations are done using the finite difference method. The flatness, skewness and spectrum of the extracted fields are also studied for each filtering method. Results show that the two filtering methods can identify the coherent fields and preserve the features of the turbulent fields. Comparisons to the wavelet and Fourier decompositions are also considered.