Where do small, weakly inertial particles go in a turbulent flow?

Mathieu Gibert (1) , Haitao Xu (2) , Eberhard Bodenschatz (2)

1 NEEL - HELFA - Hélium : du fondamental aux applications
2 LFPN - Laboratory for Fluid Physics, Pattern Formation and Biocomplexity

We report experimental results on the dynamics of heavy particles of the size of the Kolmogorov scale in a fully developed turbulent flow. The mixed Eulerian structure function of two-particle velocity and acceleration difference vectors $\langle {\delta }_{r} \mathbi{v}\boldsymbol{\cdot} {\delta }_{r} {\mathbi{a}}_{\mathbi{p}} \rangle $ was observed to increase significantly with particle inertia for identical flow conditions. We show that this increase is related to a preferential alignment between these dynamical quantities. With increasing particle density the probability for those two vectors to be collinear was observed to grow. We show that these results are consistent with the preferential sampling of strain-dominated regions by inertial particles.

Mots clés: homogeneous turbulence; isotropic turbulence; particle/fluid flows

Domaines: Mécanique des fluides [physics.class-ph]; Mécanique des fluides [physics.class-ph]; Dynamique des Fluides [physics.flu-dyn]

Mathieu Gibert, Haitao Xu, Eberhard Bodenschatz. Where do small, weakly inertial particles go in a turbulent flow?. Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 2012, 698, pp.160-167. ⟨10.1017/jfm.2012.72⟩. ⟨hal-00985022⟩