A New View of Developed Turbulence

In this paper, we present a detailed statistical analysis of selected experimental data which leads to a new model of the energy cascade process. At fixed inertial scale r, experiments are not inconsistent with a Gaussian distribution of lne(r) where e(r) is the local transfert rate. The same experiments suggest, however, that the variance >δ(lne(r))2< has a power law behaviour r-β and not a logarithmic one as assumed in the log-normal model. From this point of view βlnr appears as a universal variable. This is confirmed by energy spectra E(k), measured during the past thirty years, which merge on a single curve when plotted as ln(E(k))/lnRe versus ln(k)/lnRe, suggesting that β is inversely proportional to lnRe. An extremum principle approach gives all these results and suggests that β would be the co-dimension of the dissipative structures.