Orientation Patterns of non-spherical Particles in Turbulence

ORAL

Abstract

In experiments and numerical simulations we measured angles between the orientations of small spheroids in turbulence. Since turbulent strains tend to align nearby spheroids, one might think that their relative angles are quite small. We show that this intuition fails in general: the distribution of relative angles has heavy power-law tails, and the dynamics evolves to a fractal attractor despite the fact that the fluid velocity is spatially smooth at small scales. The fractal geometry depends on particle shape, and it determines the power-law exponents. This talk is based on joint work by L. Zhao, K. Gustavsson, R. Ni, S. Kramel, G. A. Voth, H. I. Anderson, and B. Mehlig (arXiv:1707.06037).

*KG and BM were supported by the grant "Bottlenecks for particle growth in turbulent aerosols" from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, Dnr. KAW 2014.0048, and in part by VR grant no. 2013-3992. Computational resources were provided by C3SE and SNIC. LZ and HA benefited from a grant (project no. 250

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Presenters

  • Bernhard Mehlig

    • Department of Physics, University of Gothenburg
    • Gothenburg University
    • Physics, University of Gothenburg

Authors

  • Lihao Zhao

    • Engineering Mechanics, Tsinghua University

  • Kristian Gustavsson

    • Physics, University of Gothenburg

  • Rui Ni

    • Mechanical Engineering, Pennsylvania State University

  • Stefan Kramel

    • Physics, Wesleyan

  • Greg Voth

    • Physics, Wesleyan

  • Helge Andersson

    • NTNU

  • Bernhard Mehlig

    • Department of Physics, University of Gothenburg
    • Gothenburg University
    • Physics, University of Gothenburg