Motion of inertial particles in Gaussian fields driven by an infinite-dimensional fractional Brownian motion

Abstract

We study the motion of an inertial particle in a fractional Gaussian random field. The motion of the particle is described by Newton's second law, where the force is proportional to the difference between the background fluid velocity and the particle velocity. The fluid velocity satisfies a linear stochastic partial differential equation driven by an infinite-dimensional fractional Brownian motion with an arbitrary Hurst parameter H ∈ (0, 1). The usefulness of such random velocity fields in simulations is that we can create random velocity fields with desired statistical properties, thus generating artificial images of realistic turbulent flows. This model also captures the clustering phenomenon of preferential concentration, observed in real world and numerical experiments, i.e. particles cluster in regions of low-vorticity and high-strain rate. We prove almost sure existence and uniqueness of particle paths and give sufficient conditions to rewrite this system as a random dynamical system with a global random pullback attractor. Finally, we visualize the random attractor through a numerical experiment.