Rotation Rate of Particle Pairs in Homogeneous Isotropic Turbulence

Abstract

Understanding the dynamics of particles in turbulent flow is important in many environmental and industrial applications. In this paper, the statistics of particle pair orientation is numerically studied in homogeneous isotropic turbulent flow, with Taylor microscale Reynolds number of 300. It is shown that the Kolmogorov scaling fails to predict the observed probability density functions (PDFs) of the pair rotation rate and the higher order moments accurately. Therefore, a multifractal formalism is derived in order to include the intermittent behavior that is neglected in the Kolmogorov picture. The PDFs of finding the pairs at a given angular velocity for small relative separations reveals extreme events with stretched tails and high kurtosis values. Additionally, The PDFs are found to be less intermittent and follow a complementary error function distribution for larger separations.

16 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in European Journal of Mechanics / B Fluids

References in corpus (8)

• Rotation Rate of Rods in Turbulent Fluid Flow
• Rotation of a spheroid in a simple shear at small Reynolds number
• Effect of weak fluid inertia upon Jeffery orbits
• Inertial Range Scaling in Rotations of Long Rods in Turbulence
• Extreme events in the dispersions of two neighboring particles under the influence of fluid turbulence
• Fully developed turbulence and the multifractal conjecture
• Intermittency in the relative separations of tracers and of heavy particles in turbulent flows
• Panaches horizontaux non-Boussinesq en milieu homogène