Speaker
Bernhard Mehlig
(Gothenburg University)
Description
In experiments and numerical simulations we measured angles
between the orientations of small spheroids in turbulence.
Since turbulent strains tend to align nearby spheroids, one
might think that their relative angles are quite small. We
show that this intuition fails in general: the distribution
of relative angles has heavy power-law tails, and the
dynamics evolves to a fractal attractor despite the fact
that the fluid velocity is spatially smooth at small scales.
The fractal geometry depends on particle shape, and it
determines the power-law exponents.
This talk is based on joint work with L. Zhao, K.
Gustavsson, R. Ni, S. Kramel, G. A. Voth, and H. I. Andersson.
