Advection in weakly time-dependent two-dimensional flows

3 Advection in weakly time-dependent two-dimensional flows 

In steady two-dimensional flows the spatial structure of the streamlines imposes strong restrictions on the advection of fluid elements. 

However, this does not apply to the case when the flow is time-dependent. Here we consider the changes in advective transport arising from the time-dependence introduced as a small perturbation so that the streamfunction is of the form 

The advection problem is thus described by a periodically driven non-autonomous Hamiltonian dynamical system. In such case, besides the two spatial dimensions an additional variable is needed to complete the phase space description, which is conveniently taken to be the cyclic temporal coordinate, r = t mod T, representing the phase of the periodic time-dependence of the flow. In time-dependent flows ip is not conserved along the trajectories, hence trajectories are no longer restricted to the streamlines. The structure of the trajectories in the phase space can be visualized on a Poincare section that contains the intersection points of the trajectories with a plane corresponding to a specified fixed phase of the flow, tq. On this stroboscopic section the advection dynamics can be defined by the stroboscopic Lagrangian map 

The dynamics of such systems is described by the Kolmogorov-Arnold-Moser theory of nearly integrable conservative dynamical systems (see e.g. Ott (1993)). For e = 0 the fluid elements move along the streamlines and the trajectories in the phase space form tubes parallel to the time axis. Due to the periodicity in the temporal direction these tubes form tori that fill the whole phase space and are invariant surfaces for the motion of the fluid elements. Each torus 

---