The energy dissipation rate is an important concept in the theory of turbulence. Doering-Constantin's variational principle characterizes the upper bounds (maximum) of the time-averaged rate of viscous energy dissipation. In the present study, an optimization theoretical point of view was adopted to recast Doering-Constantin's formulation into a minimax principle for the energy dissipation of an incompressible shear flow. Then, the Kakutani minimax theorem in the game theory is applied to obtain a set of conditions, under which the maximization and the minimization in the minimax principle are commutative. The results explain the spectral constraint of Doering-Constantin, and confirm the equivalence between Doering-Constantin's variational principle and Howard-Busse's statistical turbulence theory.
The Stokes operator is a differential-integral operator induced by the Stokes equations. In this paper, we analyze the Stokes operator from the point of view of the Helmholtz minimum dissipation principle. We show that, through the Hodge orthogonal decomposition, a pair of bounded linear operators, a restriction operator and an extension operator, are induced from the divergence-free constraint. As a consequence, we use it to calculate the eigenvalues of the Stokes operator.
