Identifiability Limits of Reynolds-Stress Attribution in Localized Nonorthogonal Flow Representations

Abstract

Reynolds stress is assembled from correlations among velocity fluctuations; assigning it to named vortical structures additionally requires their velocity fields to be separable. We examine this requirement in homogeneous isotropic turbulence from the Johns Hopkins Turbulence Databases (JHTDB) using a frozen solenoidal expansion of curl-lifted anisotropic Gaussian vorticity functions. The expansion retains locally addressable blob-, sheet-, and tube-like geometry, while its fixed Biot-Savart map carries coefficient covariance exactly into the stress of the represented Gaussian velocity. Principal-angle geometry and self-cross covariance then connect overlap between group velocity spans to stress assembly. At a principal cosine of 0.95, 55% of the sheet-associated directions are also closely represented by the tube-like family, and products within the shared directions carry 99.6% of the covariance cancellation. Removing between-family covariance increases the direct numerical simulation (DNS)-referenced stress error by factors of 53.6 to 87. Orthogonal Fourier and proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) regroupings of the same velocity remove this cancellation, showing that it follows from the local nonorthogonal organization rather than from the represented field alone. The morphology labels remain representation-dependent, but their physical consequence is direct: Reynolds stress in this local description is carried by coupled velocity fluctuations, not by additive component energies. Localized nonorthogonal representations can therefore reveal how turbulent momentum flux is assembled, provided that span overlap and cross covariance are retained.