LAUSR

Abstract The understanding of turbulent flow and the turbulent energy cascade is a main unresolved problem in physics. To model the energy cascade (which refers to the energy transfer among the different scales of vortices), we introduce a mechanistic turbulence model which is a binary tree of masses and springs, in which the bottom masses are connected to the ground with dampers. The eigenvalue distribution of the system is a devil’s staircase type distribution. The discrete energy spectrum of the mechanistic model is defined and calculated for various mass and stiffness distributions. We find parameters for which the energy spectrum shares the features of the Kolmogorov-spectrum of turbulence.