Settling velocity of quasi-neutrally-buoyant inertial particles

Abstract

We investigate the sedimentation properties of quasi-neutrally buoyant inertial particles carried by incompressible zero-mean fluid flows. We obtain generic formulae for the terminal velocity in generic space-and-time periodic (or steady) flows, along with further information for flows endowed with some degree of spatial symmetry such as odd parity in the vertical direction. These expressions consist in space-time integrals of auxiliary quantities that satisfy partial differential equations of the advection–diffusion–reaction type, which can be solved at least numerically, since our scheme implies a huge reduction of the problem dimensionality from the full phase space to the classical physical space.