Coagulation and fragmentation dynamics of inertial particles

Abstract

Inertial particles suspended in many natural and industrial flows undergo coagulation upon collisions and fragmentation if their size becomes too large or if they experience large shear. Here we study this coagulation-fragmentation process in time-periodic incompressible flows. We find that this process approaches an asymptotic, dynamical steady state where the average number of particles of each size is roughly constant. We compare the steady-state size distributions corresponding to two fragmentation mechanisms and for different flows and find that the steady state is mostly independent of the coagulation process. While collision rates determine the transient behavior, fragmentation determines the steady state. For example, for fragmentation due to shear, flows that have very different local particle concentrations can result in similar particle size distributions if the temporal or spatial variation of shear forces is similar.

8 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (10)

• Caustics in turbulent aerosols
• Fractal clustering of inertial particles in random flows
• Sling effect in collisions of water droplets in turbulent clouds
• Clustering and collisions of heavy particles in random smooth flows
• Quantifying turbulence induced segregation of inertial particles
• Unmixing in Random Flows
• Can aerosols be trapped in open flows?
• Bailout Embeddings and Neutrally Buoyant Particles in Three-Dimensional Flows
• Aggregation and fragmentation dynamics of inertial particles in chaotic flows
• Moving Finite Size Particles in a Flow: A Physical Example for Pitchfork Bifurcations of Tori

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Influence of the history force on inertial particle advection: Gravitational effects and horizontal diffusion
• Memory effects in chaotic advection of inertial particles
• Particle-based modelling of aggregation and fragmentation processes: Fractal-like aggregates
• What Determines Size Distributions of Heavy Drops in a Synthetic Turbulent Flow?
• Aggregation and fragmentation dynamics in random flows: From tracers to inertial aggregates
• Flow spatial structure determines pattern instabilities in nonlocal models of population dynamics
• A map for heavy inertial particles in fluid flows