Soft Seminars

Turbophoresis of heavy inertial particles in statistically homogeneous flow

by Prof. Jeremie Bec

Europe/Stockholm
Nordita

Nordita

Description

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https://stockholmuniversity.zoom.us/j/622224375

Meeting ID: 622 224 375
 

 Abstract:

Dispersed particles suspended in turbulent flows are widely encountered in nature or industry under the form of droplets, dust, or sediments. When they are heavier than the fluid, such particles possess inertia and are ejected by centrifugal forces from the most violent vortical structures of the carrier phase. Once cumulated along particle paths, this small-scale mechanism produces an effective large-scale drift where particles leave the excited turbulent zones and converge to calmer regions to form uneven spatial distributions. This fundamental phenomenon, called turbophoresis, has been extensively used to explain why particles transported by non-homogeneous flows concentrate near the minima of the turbulent kinetic energy.
It is here shown that turbophoretic effects are just as crucial in statistically homogeneous and isotropic flows. Instantaneous spatial fluctuations of the turbulent activity, despite their uniform average, trigger local fluxes that play a key role in the emergence of inertial-range inhomogeneities in the particle distribution. Direct numerical simulations are used to thoroughly probe and depict the statistics of particle accelerations and in particular their scale-averaged properties conditioned on the local turbulent activity. They confirm the relevance of the local energy dissipation to describe instantaneous spatial fluctuations of turbulence. This analysis yields an effective coarse- grained dynamics, in which particles detachment from the fluid and their ejection from excited regions are accounted for by a space and time-dependent non-Fickian diffusion.

Organised by

Dhrubaditya Mitra