Energy cascade

Summary

The energy cascade is the transfer of kinetic energy in three-dimensional turbulence from large eddies to successively smaller ones. Energy enters at the large scales, passes through an intermediate range of scales almost without loss, and is dissipated by viscosity at the Kolmogorov scale. The picture goes back to Lewis Fry Richardson in the 1920s and was made quantitative by Kolmogorov in 1941. It explains why the rate of dissipation in turbulence does not depend on the viscosity when the viscosity is small.