English
Related papers

Related papers: Paths to caustic formation in turbulent aerosols

200 papers

Caustic singularities of the spatial distribution of particles in turbulent aerosols enhance collision rates and accelerate coagulation. Here we investigate how and where caustics form at weak particle inertia, by analysing a…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2024-05-16 Jan Meibohm , Kristian Gustavsson , Bernhard Mehlig

We study the formation of caustics in vortex-dominated \flows. We \find that only particles starting within a critical distance of a vortex which scales as the square roots of the particle inertia and the circulation can form sling…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2015-06-24 S. Ravichandran , Rama Govindarajan

Caustics in the dynamics of heavy particles in turbulence accelerate particle collisions. The rate $\mathscr{J}$ at which these singularities form depends sensitively on the Stokes number St, the non-dimensional inertia parameter. Exact…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2025-10-01 J. Meibohm , L. Sundberg , B. Mehlig , K. Gustavsson

Inertial particles (IPs) in vortical fluid flow cluster strongly, forming singular structures termed caustics for their resemblance to focal surfaces in optics. Here we show that such extreme aggregation onto low-dimensional submanifolds…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2026-03-26 Rahul Chajwa , Rajarshi , Rama Govindarajan , Sriram Ramaswamy

Estimating collision rates is of immense importance in particle-laden flows. An economical way of doing this is to directly identify incidences of caustics, or extreme clustering, by tracking particle velocity gradients in the neighborhoods…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2026-01-21 C. Rajarshi , Rama Govindarajan

The rate of collision and the relative velocities of the colliding particles in turbulent flows is a crucial part of several natural phenomena, e.g., rain formation in warm clouds and planetesimal formation in a protoplanetary disks. The…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2022-02-23 Akshay Bhatnagar , Vikash Pandey , Prasad Perlekar , Dhrubaditya Mitra

Caustics are natural phenomena in which nature concentrates the energy of waves. Although, they are known mostly in optics, caustics are intrinsic to all wave phenomena. For example, studies show that fluctuations in the profile of an ocean…

Optics · Physics 2017-11-22 Akbar Safari , Robert Fickler , Miles J. Padgett , Robert W. Boyd

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.…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2009-11-10 M. Wilkinson , B. Mehlig

The statistics of velocity differences between very heavy inertial particles suspended in an incompressible turbulent flow is found to be extremely intermittent. When particles are separated by distances within the viscous subrange, the…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2009-05-11 J. Bec , L. Biferale , M. Cencini , A. S. Lanotte , F. Toschi

Finding a quantitative description of the rate of collisions between small particles suspended in mixing flows is a long-standing problem. Here we investigate the validity of a parameterisation of the collision rate for identical particles…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2016-06-01 K. Gustavsson , B. Mehlig

We discuss the relation between three recent approaches of describing the dynamics and the spatial distribution of particles suspended in turbulent flows: phase-space singularities in the inertial particle dynamics (caustics), real-space…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2015-06-05 K. Gustavsson , E. Meneguz , M. Reeks , B. Mehlig

The influence of clustering on the collision rate of inertial particles in a smooth random velocity field, mimicking the smaller scales of a turbulent flow, is analyzed. For small values of the the ratio between the relaxation time of the…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2009-11-13 Piero Olla

The formation of a singularity in a compressible gas, as described by the Euler equation, is characterized by the steepening, and eventual overturning of a wave. Using a self-similar description in two space dimensions, we show that the…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2017-05-24 J. Eggers , T. Grava , M. A. Herrada , G. Pitton

We study the evolution of density in an expanding Bose-Einstein condensate that initially has a spatially varying phase, concentrating on behaviour when these phase variations are large. In this regime large density fluctuations develop…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2009-08-07 J. T. Chalker , B. Shapiro

In a one-dimensional model for a turbulent aerosol (inertial particles suspended in a random flow) we compute the distributions of particle-velocity gradients and the rate of caustic formation at finite but small Kubo numbers Ku, for…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2013-03-05 K. Gustavsson , B. Mehlig

I investigate the caustics produced by the fall of collisionless dark matter in and out of a galaxy in the limit of negligible velocity dispersion. The outer caustics are spherical shells enveloping the galaxy. The inner caustics are rings.…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-10-31 P. Sikivie

We study local features, and provide a topological insight into the global structure of the probability density distribution and of the pattern of the optimal paths for large rare fluctuations away from a stable state. In contrast to…

Condensed Matter · Physics 2009-10-22 Mark I. Dykman , Mark M. Millonas , Vadim N. Smelyanskiy

We analyze a lattice model closely related to the one-dimensional inelastic gas with periodic boundary condition. The one-dimensional inelastic gas tends to form high density clusters of particles with almost the same velocity, separated by…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2009-11-10 Srdjan Ostojic , Debabrata Panja , Bernard Nienhuis

When very small particles are suspended in a fluid in motion, they tend to follow the flow. How such tracer particles are mixed, transported, and dispersed by turbulent flow has been successfully described by statistical models. Heavy…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2023-12-21 J. Bec , K. Gustavsson , B. Mehlig

Caustic formation occurs within a ray skeleton as optical or acoustic fields propagate in a medium with variable refractive properties and are unphysical, their presence being an artifact of the ray approximation of the field, and methods…

Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics · Physics 2015-07-17 David R. Bergman
‹ Prev 1 2 3 10 Next ›