Journal of Fluid Mechanics

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

Mathieu Giberta1a4 p1, Haitao Xua1a4 and Eberhard Bodenschatza1a2a3a4 c1

a1 Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self Organization (MPIDS), 37077 Göttingen, Germany

a2 Institute for Nonlinear Dynamics, University of Göttingen, 37077 Göttingen, Germany

a3 Laboratory of Atomic and Solid-State Physics and Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA

a4 International Collaboration for Turbulence Research

Abstract

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.

(Received December 05 2011)

(Reviewed January 25 2012)

(Accepted February 03 2012)

(Online publication March 27 2012)

Key Words:

  • homogeneous turbulence;
  • isotropic turbulence;
  • particle/fluid flows

Correspondence:

c1 Email address for correspondence: eberhard.bodenschatz@ds.mpg.de

p1 Present address: Institut NÉEL CNRS/UJF (Grenoble France).

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