Coherent vortex extraction in 3D turbulent flows using orthogonal wavelets

This Letter presents a wavelet technique for extracting coherent vortices from three-dimensional turbulent flows, which is applied to a homogeneous isotropic turbulent flow at resolution N = 256(3). The coherent flow is reconstructed from only 3%N wavelet coefficients that retain the vortex tubes, and 98.9% of the energy with the same k(-5/3) spectrum as the total flow. In contrast, the remaining 97%N wavelet coefficients correspond to the incoherent flow which is structureless, decorrelated, and whose effect can therefore be modeled statistically.