Transport Barriers and Coherent Structures in Flow Data: Advective, Diffusive, Stochastic and Active Methods

Abstract

Transport barriers are observed inhibitors of the spread of substances in flows. The collection of such barriers offers a powerful geometric template that frames the main pathways, or lack thereof, in any transport process. This book surveys effective and mathematically grounded methods for defining, locating and leveraging transport barriers in numerical simulations, laboratory experiments, technological processes and nature. It provides a unified treatment of material developed over the past two decades, focusing on the methods that have a solid foundation and broad applicability to data sets beyond simple model flows. The intended audience ranges from advanced undergraduates to researchers in the areas of turbulence, geophysical flows, aerodynamics, chemical engineering, environmental engineering, flow visualization, computational mathematics and dynamical systems. Detailed open-source implementations of the numerical methods are provided in an accompanying collection of Jupyter notebooks linked from the electronic version of the book.