Heavy or light particles caught up in turbulent flows often behave differently from fluid tracers. The reason for this is the particle’s inertia, which can drive them to move along trajectories that differ from those of the surrounding fluid elements.
An interesting consequence of this is that the particles distribute inhomogeneously even when the carrier flow is statistically homogeneous. In these situations, light particles concentrate in high vorticity regions of the flow and experience intense accelerations with a high probability for extreme events compared to fluid tracers. Vieversa light particles which are ejected from vortices experience smaller acceleration fluctuations.
June 2016
Himani Garg present a poster at “Journée des Doctorants” on June 30th 2016 “Heavy particle transport in 2D elastic turbulence” [poster]
