Seminars & Events

NL/MCS Seminar
"Clusters and Voids of Inertial Particles Transported by Turbulence"

DATE: February 20, 2007
TIME: 1:00pm
SPEAKER: Luca Biferale, University of Roma
LOCATION: Building 221 Conference Room A216, Argonne National Laboratory
HOST: Fausto Cattaneo & Paul Fischer

Description:
Small impurities like dust or droplets suspended in turbulent flows are finite-size particles whose density may differ from that of the fluid and thus cannot be modeled as fluid tracers. The description of their motion, which is much more complex than that of fluid tracers, must account for their finite response time, i.e. their inertia. Remarkably such particles, which are relevant to both natural phenomena and industrial applications, display strong spatial inhomogeneities even if the carrier flow is incompressible, whose statistical description is an open issue with many industrial and environmental applications.
Results of high resolution direct numerical simulations and simple random flows are here reviewed. The statistics of their distribution is investigated at very small scales where they form (multi)fractal objects; such clustering is very efficient for particles lighter than the fluid which transport them. At larger scales, particles do not cluster into fractal objects and different approaches are needed for
understanding their statistics; here voids are the dominant structures for heavy particles.

Save the event to your calendar [schedule.ics]