Oseen vortex as a maximum entropy state of a two dimensional fluid Available to Purchase

During the last four decades, a considerable number of investigations has been carried out into the evolution of turbulence in two dimensional Navier-Stokes flows. Much of the information has come from numerical solution of the (otherwise insoluble) dynamical equations and thus has necessarily required some kind of boundary conditions: spatially periodic, no-slip, stress-free, or free-slip. The theoretical framework that has proved to be of the most predictive value has been one employing an entropy functional (sometimes called the Boltzmann entropy) whose maximization has been correlated well in several cases with the late-time configurations into which the computed turbulence has relaxed. More recently, flow in the unbounded domain has been addressed by Gallay and Wayne who have shown a late-time relaxation to the classical Oseen vortex (also sometimes called the Lamb-Oseen vortex) for situations involving a finite net circulation or non-zero total integrated vorticity. Their proof involves powerful but difficult mathematics that might be thought to be beyond the preparation of many practicing fluid dynamicists. The purpose of this present paper is to remark that relaxation to the Oseen vortex can also be predicted in the more intuitive framework that has previously proved useful in predicting computational results with boundary conditions: that of an appropriate entropy maximization. The results make no assumption about the size of the Reynolds numbers, as long as they are finite, and the viscosity is treated as finite throughout.