“…To eliminate the contamination of shear effect (Cucitore et al, 1999;Kolář, 2010), recent local approaches turn to other indicators based the velocity gradient tensor, e.g., Δ (Chong et al, 1990), Q (Hunt et al, 1988), λ2 (Jeong and Hussain, 1995), λci (Zhou et al, 1999), and Ω (Liu et al, 2016;Zhang et al, 2018). While these indicators are useful in quantifying vortex strength, it is still difficult to select a proper universal threshold for them in nonuniform flows where vortices exhibit a broad spectrum of variation in size and strength, e.g., a higher value may lead to blurring of weaker vortices, and conversely, a lower one may result in cluttering of stronger vortices (Dong et al, 2016). Such difficulty has been partially overcome by normalization of the average indicator with its root-mean-square in cases where enough samples of the flow are available for statistical analysis (Cao et al, 2017;Chen et al, 2014b;Wu and Christensen, 2006;Zhong et al, 2015).…”