The entrainment hypothesis – 80 years old and still going strong

The entrainment hypothesis states that the mean inflow velocity across the boundary of a turbulent flow is proportional to a characteristic velocity of the flow. Proposed by G. I. Taylor approximately 80 years ago, it is still a common model of turbulence closure widely used in environmental engineering and geophysical fluid mechanics. Although it is a very simple concept and mathematical model, it has proven to be able to predict the entrainment in a variety of geophysical flows, e.g. convective clouds and plumes from erupting volcanoes in the atmosphere; dense water overflows and turbidity currents in the ocean; magma injection in a magma chamber in the interior of the Earth, to name just a few. In a seminal paper, Turner ( J. Fluid Mech. , vol. 173, 1986, pp. 431–471) presents a variety of laboratory and geophysical flows to illustrate the success of the entrainment hypothesis and discusses why such a simple hypothesis works so well even when the original assumptions are no longer valid.