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Scientists have jumped forward by understanding the diagram and the structure of turbulence – a natural phenomenon observed in fluids such as moving water, ocean currents, chemical reactions, blood flow, clouds storm, smoke plumes and even the stars’ plasma.
While the turbulent flow is chaotic and irregular, because the movement of a fluid has willets or larger whirlwinds, physicists have long tried to study and model the process using mathematical equations and computers. However, even with modern supercomputers, a direct and precise simulation of all, except the simplest turbulent flows, remains out of reach, and a complete understanding of turbulence has escaped researchers for about 200 years.
Now, an international team of scientists has been the pioneer of the pioneer of a new approach to simulate turbulence that deploys an inspired method of quantum computer science, described in a study published on January 29 in the scientific advances of the journal.
The ability to have precisely modeling and predicting the phenomenon could have many practical applications in science and engineering, potentially improving the design of planes, cars, propellers, artificial hearts and more precise weather prediction, said that the main author of the Nik Gourianov study, researcher in the Physical Department of the University of Oxford.
“Turbulence was and is always an unresolved problem in the sense that we cannot simulate exactly the realistic flows on computers, that is to say that we still need a blower to conceive a wing of plane. But progress such as ours have moved away from the problem and push the border, “said Gourianov.
Most of the previous approaches to simulate turbulence were based on a deterministic strategy, which with a specific set of initial conditions still produces the same results, explained Gourianov. Instead, the new research has modeled turbulence fluctuations in a probabilistic way, an approach that takes into account the random variation.
The team applied an algorithm inspired by quantum computers with turbulent flows, allowing them to calculate in a few hours which would take a classic algorithm for several days to do on an entire supercomputer.
Quantum computers treats information fundamentally different from conventional computers. Traditional computers carry out calculations using bits: data that exists in a state at a time, one or a zero. Quantum computers use quantum bits (or “qbits), which can be zeros, zeros or any combination of the two. The study authors used a mathematical tool called tensor networks that can be used to simulate a quantum system.
James Beattie, postdoctoral research partner and colleague from the Princeton University of Astrophysical Sciences in New Jersey, said that by representing data with many variables in a simpler way, the team had accelerated calculations complexes necessary to start starting to start understanding turbulence. Beattie was not involved in research.
“The simulation they execute is a fluid simulation of two different and reacting chemicals. By using this representation, this means that this rather complex calculation can use much less memory, which allows it to run on a laptop, “added Beattie.
“Seeing advances like this (one million times a better use of memory and a thousand times accelerated in calculation) is rare, which makes it an exciting progress in the modeling of turbulence,” he said .
Although the latest study is “incredible progress”, this is not the complete story, added Beattie, noting that it does not solve the problems of scale, nor how turbulent whirlwinds of different sizes relate each other.
“Turbulence, as the authors say, is a problem with several scales, that is to say that turbulence can extend from thousands of lights unless one foot,” he said by e-mail. “We want to know how these scales talk to each other.”
“It is an aspect that makes the simulation of turbulent liquids so difficult – we want to resolve many scales in the simulation, which occupy a lot of memory and calculation, which means putting these simulations on large supervisors,” said Beattie .
The new research is “very impressive,” said Yongxiang Huang, researcher and associate professor at the State Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Science & College of Ocean and Earth Sciences of Xiamen University in southeast China.
Gourianov and the team found a new method that considerably reduces the use of memory and computer complexity, Huang, which was not involved in the study. However, he agreed that he had not painted a complete painting, which, according to him, was extremely difficult due to the wide range of scales involved.
Turbulence has been described as the oldest problem not resolved in physics. German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg would have said on her deathbed“When I meet God, I will ask him two questions: why relativity?” And why turbulence? I really think he will have an answer for the first. »»
Gourianov said that the advantage of calculating the new technique revealed by the study opens up new areas previously inaccessible to turbulence physics for a scientific investigation, although the results do not really mean that the mystery of turbulence had been Tump. This, he said, would require radically new algorithms or computer equipment compared to what is available now.
“Many scientists (exceptionally talented and gifted) have examined this problem, but we are not even about solving it,” said Gourianov.