Visualization of a turbulent jet using wavelets

An application of multiresolution image analysis to turbulence was investigated in this paper, in order to visualize the coherent structure and the most essential scales governing turbulence. The digital imaging photograph of jet slice was decomposed by two-dimensional discrete wavelet transform based on Daubechies, Coifman and Baylkin bases. The best choice of orthogonal wavelet basis for analyzing the image of the turbulent structures was first discussed. It is found that these orthonormal wavelet families with index N<10 were inappropriate for multiresolution image analysis of turbulent flow. The multiresolution images of turbulent structures were very similar when using the wavelet basis with the higher index number, even though wavelet bases are different functions. From the image components in orthogonal wavelet spaces with different scales, the further evident of the multi-scale structures in jet can be observed, and the edges of the vortices at different resolutions or scales and the coherent structure can be easily extracted.