Effect of Faxén forces on acceleration statistics of material particles in turbulent flow

The statistical description of particle dispersion in turbulent flow constitutes nowadays an active research area. Such a field is linked to the Lagrangian description of fluid turbulence and poses long standing questions on modeling of hydrodynamical forces on objects in unsteady nonuniform flows [1]. Even in the simplest conditions of highly diluted suspensions of particles whose sizes are smaller than the dissipative scale of the carrier flow, the presently available models are highly idealized. Therefore, theoretical results and predictions need systematic verifications with experimental measures. Particle tracking experiments are technically challenging for the high time and space resolution demanded and for the need to precisely estimate and control the intensity of turbulent flow. Our recent works have been devoted to comparisons between experiments and numerical simulations of simple dynamical particle models [2, 3]. We have widely investigated Lagrangian particle models evolving in a turbulent environment which is described from an Eulerian point of view. In this abstract we shortly review the methods employed: the models for particle dynamics together with the numerical methodology, and we detail on some recent progresses and results