Caustics in turbulent aerosols

By Michael Wilkinson, B. Mehlig. 2004

176 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Networks of caustics can occur in the distribution of particles suspended in a randomly moving gas. These can facilitate coagulation of particles by bringing them into close proximity, even in cases where the trajectories do not coalesce. The evolution of these caustic patterns depends upon the Lyapunov exponents λ1, λ2 of the suspended particles, as well as the rate J at which particles encounter caustics. We develop a theory determining the quantities J, λ1, λ2 from the statistical properties of the gas flow, in the limit of short correlation times.

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Ocean Engineering, Water Science and Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e9f3b45c27a24dcec71a495ebee6eb43e6372bbc

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In Environmental Engineering

In Ocean Engineering

In Water Science and Technology

Citations in the corpus

Droplet growth in warm turbulent clouds (2012, background): “Important in this regard is the analysis of Wilkinson and Mehlig (2005), who considered particle motion in a mixture of potential and solenoidal flows that lead to the existence of a filamental network of caustics (where the particle velocity field becomes multi-valued) with a very high accumulated…”
The effect of Reynolds number on inertial particle dynamics in isotropic turbulence. Part 1. Simulations without gravitational effects (2015, background): “This effect is referred to as ‘caustics’, ‘crossing trajectories’ or ‘the sling effect’, causes a departure from r2-scaling in the second-order structure functions at small separations and can lead to large relative velocities (Yudine 1959; Falkovich et al. 2002; Wilkinson & Mehlig 2005; Wilkinson e”
Sling Effect in Collisions of Water Droplets in Turbulent Clouds (2006, background): “…it has been predicted that probabilities of such events have a very sharp dependence on the Stokes number: exp[−c(Re, F )/St] (Falkovich et al 2002; Wilkinson and Mehlig 2003,2005), where neither the value of the factor c(Re, F ) nor its dependence on the Reynolds and Froude numbers is known.”
The effect of Reynolds number on inertial particle dynamics in isotropic turbulence. Part 2. Simulations with gravitational effects (2015, background): “This phenomenon has been referred to as ‘caustics’ (e.g. see Wilkinson & Mehlig 2005; Wilkinson et al. 2006).”