Effects of Forcing in Three-Dimensional Turbulent Flows

We present the results of a numerical investigation of three-dimensional homogeneous and isotropic turbulence, stirred by a random forcing with a power-law spectrum, Ef(k)~k3–y. Numerical simulations are performed at different resolutions up to 5123. We show that at varying the spectrum slope y, small-scale turbulent fluctuations change from a forcing independent to a forcing dominated statistics. We argue that the critical value separating the two behaviors, in three dimensions, is yc = 4. When the statistics is forcing dominated, for y<yc, we find dimensional scaling, i.e., intermittency is vanishingly small. On the other hand, for y>yc, we find the same anomalous scaling measured in flows forced only at large scales. We connect these results with the issue of universality in turbulent flows.