Constrained dynamics of an inertial particle in a turbulent flow

Abstract

Most of theoretical and numerical works for free advected particles in a turbulent flow, which only consider the drag force acting on the particles, fails to predict recent experimental results for the transport of finite size particles. These questions have motivated a series of experiments trying to emphasize the actual role of the drag force by imposing this one as an unambiguous leading forcing term acting on a particle in a turbulent background. This is achieved by considering the constrained dynamics of towed particles in a turbulent environment. In the present work, we focus on the influence of particles inertia on its velocity and acceleration Lagrangian statistics and energy spectral density. Our results are consistent with a filtering scenario resulting from the viscous response time of an inertial particle whose dynamics is coupled to the surrounding fluid via strong contribution of drag.