Intermittency in the closed flow between coaxial disks

The flow created in the gap between coaxial, fast rotating disks provides a rich variety of dynamical regimes at high Reynolds numbers. In the contrarotating geometry it provides a homogeneous turbulent flow in a compact volume of space while the corotating geometry adds a large scale vortex motion to the turbulent background. These regimes are used to address several issues in turbulence related to the influence of large scale dynamics: the fluctuations of global (i.e. spatially averaged) quantities, the geometrical characteristics of vorticity filaments and the statistical description of inhomogeneous turbulent flows.