Dissipation scales of kinetic helicities in turbulence

A systematic study of the influence of the viscous effect on both the spectra and the nonlinear fluxes of conserved as well as nonconserved quantities in Navier-Stokes turbulence is proposed. This analysis is used to estimate the helicity dissipation scale which is shown to coincide with the energy dissipation scale. However, it is shown using the decomposition of helicity into eigenmodes of the curl operator that viscous effects have to be taken into account for wave vectors smaller than the Kolmogorov wave number in the evolution of these eigencomponents of the helicity. (C) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi: 10.1063/1.3567253]