Folding characterization in conservative chaotic fluid flows

We study transport of passive scalar fields in a bidimensional incompressible chaotic fluid flow. For a spatially smooth velocity field with impulsive perturbations, the model is described by a randomized standard mapping. We numerically investigate passive scalar field transport for given initial concentration distributions and their dependence on the nonlinearity and noise amplitude. We show that space and time concentration histograms are determined by the underlying mechanism of stretching and folding. Moreover, to characterize this process we introduce a parameter, the average derivative of a tracer line length, which shows interesting scale properties.