Experimental study of Lagrangian turbulence in a Stokes flow

Abstract

Experimental studies are made of chaotic particle motion in a simple Stokes flow system. Surfaces-of-section that exhibit a generic mixture of regular and chaotic particle motions in good agreement with computer simulations are constructed experimentally. Deformations of line ele­ments exhibit ‘ whorl ’ and ‘ tendril ’ structures of great complexity that can be correlated directly with the underlying particle dynamics and that agree well with numerical computations. In some cases, the laboratory studies are able to resolve dynamical features more accurately than the computer studies. Experiments demonstrating that the flows exhibit poor time reversal in régimes of chaotic particle motion are also performed.