Accelerations of large inertial particles in turbulence

Abstract

Understanding the dynamics of material objects advected by turbulent flows is a long-standing question in fluid dynamics. In this perspective article we focus on the characterization of the statistical properties of non-interacting finite-sized massive spherical particles advected by a vigorous turbulent flow. We study the fluctuations and temporal correlations of particle accelerations and explore their behaviours with respect to the particle size and the particle mass density by means of fully resolved numerical simulations. We observe that the measured trends cannot be interpreted as the simple multiplicative combination of the two dominant effects: the spatial filtering of fluid accelerations and the added-mass–adjusted fluid-to-particle density ratio. We argue that other hydrodynamical forces or effects, e.g., preferential flow sampling, have still a significant role even at the largest particle sizes, which reach here the integral scale of turbulence.