Inertial particles in homogeneous shear turbulence: Experiments and direct numerical simulation

The properties of the transport of heavy inertial particles in a uniformly sheared turbulent flow have been investigated by combining experimental and numerical data at particle Stokes number St ≈ 0.3 ÷ 0.5 respectively. As in isotropic turbulence, particles are observed to avoid zones of intense enstrophy and to cluster in strain-dominated regions, resulting in highly intermittent spatial distributions. Moreover, the anisotropy of the mean flow is found to imprint a clear preferential orientation of the particle clusters in the direction of the maximum mean strain. These features are observed both in the numerics and in the experiments, and have been consistently quantified by a number of complementary statistical tools, such as the Voronoï tessellations and the pair correlation function. The latter quantity has been generalized in the form of the Angular Distribution Function and has allowed to evaluate the anisotropy content of the particle field at each scale. The behavior of this observable exhibits the same trend in the two datasets and suggests that, owing to increased inertia, the particle distribution starts to recover isotropy at scales smaller than the carrier velocity field. A proper rescaling of the two datasets in terms of their respective values of the shear scale allows to account for differences in the Reynolds number of experiments and numerics in the range of scales dominated by the mean shear. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht