Abstract

We investigate turbulence generated by cosmological structure formation by means of large eddy simulations using adaptive mesh refinement. In contrast to the widely used implicit large eddy simulations, which resolve a limited range of length scales and treat the effect of turbulent velocity fluctuations below the grid scale solely by numeri-cal dissipation, we apply a subgrid-scale model for the numerically unresolved fraction of the turbulence energy. For simulations with adaptive mesh refinement, we utilize a new methodology that allows us to adjust the scale-dependent energy variables in such a way that the sum of resolved and unresolved energies is globally conserved. We test our approach in simulations of randomly forced turbulence, a gravitationally bound cloud in a wind, and the Santa Barbara cluster. To treat inhomogeneous turbulence, we introduce an adaptive Kalman filtering technique that separates turbulent veloc-ity fluctuations on resolved length scales from the non-turbulent bulk flow. From the magnitude of the fluctuating component and the subgrid-scale turbulence energy, a total turbulent velocity dispersion of several 100 km/s is obtained for the Santa Bar-