Fluid particle accelerations in fully developed turbulence

By A. Porta, Gregory A. Voth, A. Crawford, James C. Alexander, Eberhard Bodenschatz. Nature, 2000

602 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The motion of fluid particles as they are pushed along erratic trajectories by fluctuating pressure gradients is fundamental to transport and mixing in turbulence. It is essential in cloud formation and atmospheric transport, processes in stirred chemical reactors and combustion systems, and in the industrial production of nanoparticles. The concept of particle trajectories has been used successfully to describe mixing and transport in turbulence, but issues of fundamental importance remain unresolved. One such issue is the Heisenberg–Yaglom prediction of fluid particle accelerations, based on the 1941 scaling theory of Kolmogorov. Here we report acceleration measurements using a detector adapted from high-energy physics to track particles in a laboratory water flow at Reynolds numbers up to 63,000. We find that, within experimental errors, Kolmogorov scaling of the acceleration variance is attained at high Reynolds numbers. Our data indicate that the acceleration is an extremely intermittent variable—particles are observed with accelerations of up to 1,500 times the acceleration of gravity (equivalent to 40 times the root mean square acceleration). We find that the acceleration data reflect the anisotropy of the large-scale flow at all Reynolds numbers studied.

Subfields: Computational Mechanics, Ocean Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ed612bb82fe2f50685109adee1e01af7d57ba797

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In Ocean Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Lagrangian and Eulerian pressure field evaluation of rod-airfoil flow from time-resolved tomographic PIV (2011, methodology): “Measurements of material acceleration in turbulent flows were also done earlier by Voth et al. (1998) and La Porta et al. (2000) using particle tracking technique.”
PARTICLE-TURBULENCE INTERACTIONS IN ATMOSPHERIC CLOUDS (2003, background): “Indeed, recent laboratory studies have revealed intense Lagrangian accelerations in turbulent flows (Hill & Thoroddsen 1997, La Porta et al. 2001, Voth et al. 1998), and other evidence exists for their presence in the atmosphere as well (Shaw & Oncley 2001).”
Motion of inertial particles with size larger than Kolmogorov scale in turbulent flows (2008, methodology): “[9] A.”
Acceleration statistics of finite-sized particles in turbulent flow: the role of Faxén forces (2008, unknown): “Modern experimental techniques (based on synchronization of multiple fast cameras or ultrasonic/laser Doppler velocimetry) allow nowadays to fully resolve particle tracks in turbulent flows (La Porta et al. 2001; Mordant et al. 2001; Berg 2006; Xu et al. 2006; Volk et al. 2008b).”
Acceleration statistics of heavy particles in turbulence (2005, background): “On the experimental side, the study of particle motion in turbulence has recently undergone rapid progress thanks to the development of effective optical and acoustical tracking techniques (La Porta et al. 2001, 2002; Mordant et al. 2001; Warhaft, Gylfason & Ayyalasomayajula 2005).”
Pressure statistics and their scaling in high-Reynolds-number turbulent boundary layers (2007, unknown): “Voth, Satyanarayan & Bodenschatz (1998) and La Porta et al. (2001) reported acceleration measurements using a detector adapted from high-energy physics to track particles in a laboratory water flow.”
Aspect ratio dependence of heat transfer and large-scale flow in turbulent convection (2010, background): “Large-scale flow patterns are also present in other closed turbulent flow systems, such as in high-Reynolds number turbulence in von Kárman swirling flows (La Porta et al. 2001) or Taylor vortex flows (Lathrop et al. 1992).”
Dynamics and statistics of heavy particles in turbulent flows (2006, background): “One of the most striking features that characterize tracers is the very intermittent distribution of the acceleration [28, 29, 31, 35] ; fluctuations as strong as 80 times the root mean square acceleration arms reflect the tendency of tracers to be trapped into vortical structures [28, 50, 51].”
Measurement of particle accelerations in fully developed turbulence (2001, background): “More details regarding this flow are given in Voth et al. (1988) and La Porta et al. (2000).”
Bubbly and Buoyant Particle–Laden Turbulent Flows (2020, methodology): “When extremely small, a bubble (or light particle) can serve as a passive flow visualization tool (see FT regime in Figure 2), while in other scenarios, they have been used to selectively sample intense vortical structures present in flows (Douady et al. 1991; La Porta et al. 2001).”
Study of High-Reynolds Number Isotropic Turbulence by Direct Numerical Simulation (2009, background): “Strong intermittency in time can be observed in the acceleration of fluid particles, as demonstrated experimentally by Porta et al. (2001).”
Large-eddy simulation of particle-laden turbulent flows (2008, background): “Measurements, by mean of optical devices, of the acceleration experienced by particles in a turbulent flow (e.g. Mordant et al. 2001; La Porta et al. 2002; Voth et al. 2002), provide evidence that particles are likely to experience accelerations which are many times higher than the acceleration…”
Small-scale statistics in high-resolution direct numerical simulation of turbulence: Reynolds number dependence of one-point velocity gradient statistics (2007, background): “Extensive studies have been made of these statistics (e.g. see Gotoh & Rogallo 1999; Yeung 2002 and references cited therein, e.g. Vedula & Yeung 1999; Gotoh & Fukayama 2001; La Porta et al. 2001, and Hill 2002a; Sawford et al. 2003; Biferale et al. 2004; Biferale et al. 2005; Yeung et al. 2006).”