Forward and backward in time dispersion of fluid and inertial particles in isotropic turbulence

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate both theoretically and numerically the Forward-In-Time (FIT) and Backward-In-Time (BIT) dispersion of fluid and inertial particle-pairs in isotropic turbulence. Fluid particles are known to separate faster BIT than FIT in three-dimensional turbulence, and we find that inertial particles do the same. However, we find that the irreversibility in the inertial particle dispersion is in general much stronger than that for fluid particles. For example, the ratio of the BIT to FIT mean-square separation can be up to an order of magnitude larger for the inertial particles than for the fluid particles. We also find that for both the inertial and fluid particles, the irreversibility becomes stronger as the scale of their separation decreases. Regarding the physical mechanism for the irreversibility, we argue that whereas the irreversibility of fluid particle-pair dispersion can be understood in terms of a directional bias arising from the energy transfer process in turbulence, inertial particles experience an additional source of irreversibility arising from the non-local contribution to their velocity dynamics, a contribution that vanishes in the limit St → 0, where St is the particle Stokes number. For each given initial (final, in the BIT case) separation, r0, there is an optimum value of St for which the dispersion irreversibility is strongest, as such particles are optimally affected by both sources of irreversibility. We derive analytical expressions for the BIT, mean-square separation of inertial particles and compare the predictions with numerical data obtained from a Reλ ≈ 582 (where Reλ is the Taylor Reynolds number) Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) of particle-laden isotropic turbulent flow. The small-time theory, which in the dissipation range is valid for times ≤max[Stτη, τη] (where τη is the Kolmogorov time scale), is in excellent agreement with the DNS. The theory for long-times is in good agreement with the DNS provided that St is small enough so that the inertial particle motion at long-times may be considered as a perturbation about the fluid particle motion, a condition that would in fact be satisfied for arbitrary St at sufficiently long-times in the limit Reλ → ∞.