Gyulassy, AttilaBremer, Peer-TimoGrout, RayKolla, HemanthChen, JacquelinePascucci, ValerioH. Carr, P. Rheingans, and H. Schumann2015-03-032015-03-0320141467-8659https://doi.org/10.1111/cgf.12361Recently, dissipation elements have been gaining popularity as a mechanism for measurement of fundamental properties of turbulent flow, such as turbulence length scales and zonal partitioning. Dissipation elements segment a domain according to the source and destination of streamlines in the gradient flow field of a scalar function f :M!R. They have traditionally been computed by numerically integrating streamlines from the center of each voxel in the positive and negative gradient directions, and grouping those voxels whose streamlines terminate at the same extremal pair. We show that the same structures map well to combinatorial topology concepts developed recently in the visualization community. Namely, dissipation elements correspond to sets of cells of the Morse- Smale complex. The topology-based formulation enables a more exploratory analysis of the nature of dissipation elements, in particular, in understanding their stability with respect to small scale variations. We present two examples from combustion science that raise significant questions about the role of small scale perturbation and indeed the definition of dissipation elements themselves.