Until today, the transition from laminar flows to fully turbulent ones remains a process which cannot be fully explained in fluid dynamics. In an extensive physical experiment, Lemoult et al. (2016) collect a large quantity of data on the development of turbulence in Couette flows. They then provide some evidence that it falls into the directed percolation universality class, one of the most popular models for non-equilibrium phase transitions in natural sciences. Using geostatistical tools, we analyse their data to find further structural behaviour, showing similarities and differences between the transition to turbulence in incompressible fluids and directed percolation.
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Until today, the transition from laminar flows to fully turbulent ones remains a process which cannot be fully explained in fluid dynamics. In an extensive physical experiment, Lemoult et al. (2016) collect a large quantity of data on the development of turbulence in Couette flows. They then provide some evidence that it falls into the directed percolation universality class, one of the most popular models for non-equilibrium phase transitions in natural sciences. Using geostatistical tools, we...
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