Transition to turbulence via spatiotemporal intermittency

The transition to turbulence via spatiotemporal intermittency for weakly confined systems is studied. Purely stochastic models, in terms of probabilistic cellular automata (as close as possible to the qualitative behaviour of the coupled map lattices), allow the development of a standard mean-field approximation. The presence of defects is considered to explain the evolution of the laminar phase. Results indicate a discontinuous transition when the connectivity is low (2 neighbors) and that the turbulent regime is hardly observable for higher neighbor number. The data interpretation is based on the usual concepts of thermodynamic phase transitions and standard statistical mechanics