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

• Published in: Journal of fluid mechanics 2012-05, Vol.698, p.160-167
• Main Authors: Gibert, Mathieu, Xu, Haitao, Bodenschatz, Eberhard
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Density; Engineering Sciences; Exact sciences and technology; Fluid Dynamics; Fluid flow; Fluid mechanics; Fluids mechanics; Fundamental areas of phenomenology (including applications); Inertial; Instrumentation for fluid dynamics; Isotropic turbulence; homogeneous turbulence; Mathematical analysis; Mechanics; Multiphase and particle-laden flows; Nonhomogeneous flows; Particle physics; Physics; Turbulence; Turbulent flow; Turbulent flows, convection, and heat transfer; Vectors (mathematics); Velocity
• ISSN: 0022-1120; 1469-7645
• DOI: 10.1017/jfm.2012.72

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.